Semantic data alignment solution achieves continuous tracking of critical OSS and BSS systems to solve customer service and revenue assurance challenges and delivers OPEX cost reduction.

London, UK, September 1st, 2009 – Today, Ontology Systems, the company behind the ground breaking OSS/CAD application, announce that Internet Solutions, the South African based Converged Communication Services Provider, has extended the footprint of Ontology Systems’ OSS/CAD[1] to automate a pre-existing manual Data Integrity and Data Alignment project to deliver dramatic results by the automation, correction and continuous monitoring of critical OSS and BSS systems aligning thousands of complex enterprise customers. 

The new extension, which took just over a month to finish, aligns data in five key OSS and BSS systems – CRM, Network Discovery, Circuit Inventory, IP Services Inventory and Data Centre Service Inventory – to provide an accurate picture of what services are being delivered to each and every enterprise customer. 

The OSS/CAD solution has been hailed by Internet Solutions as not just an astonishing breakthrough in customer and service management, but a major competitive advantage for Internet Solutions to deliver automated correction and continuous monitoring for cross-OSS and BSS Data Alignment, Service Management, Revenue Assurance and Risk Management (fraud and exposure). 

Daniel Schultz, Manager of Voice, Billing and Provisioning at Internet Solutions stated: “Given our rapid growth in customers and the expansion and migration of our infrastructure we understand the challenge of keeping enterprise customer service and infrastructure data accurate and aligned across the silos.  The cost consequences of misalignment affect revenue, risk and service management and are just too important to ignore.  Unfortunately, a single complex customer audit can take weeks to manually perform, so we were looking for a faster result.”

Schultz continued: “The solution to the problem was already within our grasp, OSS/CAD had been previously deployed for SIA and all we had to do was simply extend OSS/CAD’s’ deployment; it took less than a month to deploy. OSS/CAD automates and operationalises our manual audit process, improving efficiency, quality and customer satisfaction and dramatically lowering OPEX. ”

Benedict Enweani, Ontology’s CEO added: “OSS/CAD’s semantic approach to data alignment is unique in the Telco industry and its deployment at Internet Solutions underlines the fact that OSS/CAD is a disruptive application for driving down the cost of core OSS/ BSS estates.”

Enweani continued: “When Internet Solutions told us that they wanted to expand their OSS/CAD deployment we were delighted.  OSS/CAD is intended to be an agile, bottom-up solution and this project shows how the semantic approach can rapidly address issues across technical and commercial boundaries.  OSS/CAD is now detecting the data misalignments that cause: duplicated customer records, over and under billing, stranded assets and poor correspondence between service definitions and network configuration.   Additionally, OSS/CAD has improved the integrity of the IT systems by providing an effective way to reconfirm lost or corrupted service tags and unique keys.”

Richard Askham, Senior Operations Manager - Systems, Internet Solutions concluded: “Internet Solutions has grown rapidly from an ISP to become South Africa’s premier Converged Communication Services Provider.  The challenge of managing sophisticated services running over converged IP/MPLS networks and Data Center infrastructures, with COTS systems, is very difficult. Our original decision to select Ontology Systems’ OSS/CAD has provided us with a unique capability to understand and manage this complexity and grow in use as we tackle more and more services related challenges.“

OSS/CAD is running live at Internet Solutions today across the OSS and BSS estate.

Notes:
[1] – Please refer to press release 15th May 2008 ‘OSS/CAD selected by Internet Solutions’ - http://www.ontology.com/newsevents/news-releases/osscad™-selected-by-internet-solutions