Organization Overview & Industry Outlook
Technology Research Institute has been analyzing the telecom billing and OSS market since off-the-shelf software first appeared in the early 1990s.
In the 1994 and 1995 TRI published the first widely available market research reports on telecom data warehousing, wireline billing, and wireless billing solutions. In 1997, TRI's research director, Dan Baker, was the keynote speaker at the first annual Jefferies & Company Telecommunications Billing and Customer Care conference for financial analysts in New York.
When OSS software took hold in the late 90's, TRI once again chronicled the market's rise, providing research reports to help telecoms choose best-fit solutions and vendors understand the competitive climate.
In the 21st century, the OSS/BSS market matured greatly. There has been substantial consolidation of vendor players, yet new software and services firms are entering the arena all the time.
In fact, we feel that the dawn of creativity has just begun in OSS and BSS systems because the solutions demanded today are generally more sophisticated than what appeared in the 1990s. The telecom industry now requires systems to manage and bill for highly complex services such as mobile data, high-speed internet, VoIP, IPTV, and third party content.
System consolidation and transforming legacy systems into something cheaper to run and maintain is another big driver of OSS/BSS innovation. Then there's the need to automate systems and lower OPEX costs.
Still another area of growing opportunity is analytics -- data-intensive systems that monitor customer behavior, assure revenue, lower interconnect costs, validate credits risks, detect fraud, and manage network/business policy in real-time. We'll soon deliver a new report that analyzes that area in depth.
The long and short of it is that while the OSS/BSS solutions market has matured in recent years, there's still plenty of room for growth in new software and services solutions.
In the future, TRI plans to continue following the OSS/BSS and services marketplace as its specialty, offering assistance to its clients in three key areas: