IBM charged with delivering NBN Co OSS/BSS

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 29 March 2011 12:39

IT Industry - Deals

NBN Co has appointed IBM as the prime systems integrator of its operational and business support systems (OSS/BSS). Under a three year contract IBM will be responsible for implementing and operating the full range of NBN CO's OSS/BSS requirements using components sourced from its own product range and the services o several subcontractors.

NBN Co said the overall cost of the project over the next three years was estimated to be $200m. "Using these systems, retail service providers (RSPs) will be able to order new services, report faults or perform service qualification checks via business-to-business interfaces and/or portals designed to allow transparent and flexible management of their own services on the national broadband network," NBN CO said.

"The systems will also allow NBN Co to monitor the performance of its network and bill RSPs for the services they order and operate."

Andrew Stevens, managing director of IBM Australia and New Zealand, told iTWire: "The contract will run for three years and is made up of a one year build and two years support… We also have a ten year master services agreement [with NBN Co] and we envisage that there may be additional work under that."

According to NBN Co, "This contract is designed to deliver the five key core business and operational support systems components: fulfilment, assurance, resource management, billing and integration and B2B. Implementation has just started and will be completed in four releases."

David Murray, general manager of IBM's NBN business, told iTWire: "IBM has end to end responsibility for the OSS/BSS solution. We have an outcomes-based agreement with NBN on both end-to end performance levels and within that scope of work there are subcontractors in our prime contract who will help us deliver on that."

He said the five subcontractors were all contracted to provide services to fulfil various components of the full scope of an OSS/BSS, namely: integration and business process flow, service assurance, customer care and billing, network planning construction and inventory management.

IBM will supply its NetCool service assurance product, WebSphere Telco Content Pack and its development toolkit. Five subcontractors will provide a range of other services: Planwell, Eirteic Consulting (a Tivoli deployment specialist), Alcatel-Lucent, BMC and Accenture.

Fulfilment will be implemented by Alcatel-Lucent using a product from CompTel, and Accenture will contribute to network planning, construction and inventory management using technology from Australian company Spatial.

NBN Co head of network operations, Steve Christian said: "This is a unique opportunity to implement these support systems without having to contend with the challenges of legacy systems. We will be carrying out this project by means of an integrated team of experienced providers all working together to achieve real end-to-end business outcomes.

"By also working closely with our customers, the RSPs, we will ensure that these systems are delivered and optimised across business-to-business interfaces and/or portals, allowing each RSP a high level of flexibility in terms of their choice to automate on their side of these interfaces."

Murray said NBN Co would draw upon IBM's global telecommunications industry expertise and systems integration capabilities for the project/ " He told iTWire: "We have not assessed whether we will need to expand the local team to be able to deliver on this contract. One of the reasons NBN Co selected IBM was that this will require integrated global capabilities. We have already drawn on expertise from our Austin Texas labs. We already have a significant capability in Australia through our work with the other telcos."

NBN Co CEO, Mike Quigley, said: "A key factor for us when choosing IBM for this important project was IBM's global and local track record for managing complex, mission critical programmes."

He had earlier suggested that NBN Co would not be able to source its full OSS/BSS requirements from available products and would have to build some itself, but that challenge now appears to have been contracted to IBM.

He told an industry forum in Melbourne earlier this month: "I would have liked to have been able to pick up an OSS/BSS from somewhere else around the world but we are having to build that largely from the ground up and that is quite an undertaking."