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Business and Operations Support Systems

Sell. Deliver. Get paid.

OSS (Operations Support Systems) and BSS (Business Support Systems) are the backbone of a communications service provider’s operations and business management.

OSS keeps your services running smoothly behind the scenes. It manages service orchestration, assurance, and everything that ensures your network works as it should. BSS is the business engine. It handles billing, charging, mediation, and order management – making sure you can sell, deliver, and get paid for your services.

Even though OSS and BSS do different jobs, they work hand in hand. Together, they connect your technology with your business goals.

Today, the telecom world is moving toward autonomous networks and smarter connectivity. Transforming OSS/BSS is essential to making that happen. The right solutions break down data silos, simplify complex processes, and replace outdated systems. This means you can act faster, innovate more, and serve your customers better.

A modern OSS/BSS is agile, data-driven, and ready for the future. It uses trusted data, AI-powered automation, scalable cloud infrastructure, and flexible service orchestration. It converts technology into revenue and keeps evolving so you’re always prepared for what’s next.

Mapping the OSS/BSS transformation journey: Accelerate innovation and commercial success

Identify the most effective pathways for modernizing OSS/BSS to support the shift toward high performing programmable networks. Read the IDC infobrief.

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Traditionally, OSS and BSS have operated in silos, leading to inefficiencies, delayed service rollouts, and fragmented customer experiences. In today's competitive telecommunications landscape, CSPs must integrate these systems cohesively to enhance agility, improve customer satisfaction, and expedite the launch of new services.

However, legacy OSS/BSS systems present significant challenges, particularly with the advent of 5G technology. Overcoming these obstacles requires technical upgrades and a fundamental shift in technology and organizational culture. Understanding these challenges is crucial for CSPs aiming to modernize and integrate their OSS/BSS systems effectively.

Lack of standardization and customization

Traditional OSS/BSS systems are heavily customized, leading to a fragmented series of bespoke integrations that can be difficult to standardize or update. This lack of interoperability creates inefficiencies, slowing operations and making it challenging for CSPs to innovate or scale effectively.

Siloed systems and bottlenecks

Legacy systems often operate in isolation, with limited communication between them. This siloed setup disrupts data flow, creates operational bottlenecks, and slows service delivery. These inefficiencies become increasingly problematic as CSPs scale their operations and strive to meet the demands of 5G.

5G and the data explosion

5G introduces new challenges, such as managing vast volumes of data and supporting dynamic network slicing, which traditional systems cannot handle. Legacy OSS/BSS architectures lack the flexibility and real-time capabilities required for modern billing, service orchestration, and data management, limiting CSPs' ability to fully leverage 5G opportunities.

The future of OSS/BSS lies in fully integrated, intelligent, and adaptable platforms that can keep pace with the telecom industry's evolution toward 5G, IoT, and increasingly hyperconnected ecosystems.

As we transition from traditional connectivity to digital service platforms at the center of expansive partner ecosystems, success will depend on our ability to enable seamless collaboration with third-party developers. To thrive in this ecosystem, it is also crucial to integrate partner marketplaces and adopt innovative pricing and bundling strategies suited to complex, multisided business models.

To drive this transformation, OSS/BSS systems are evolving beyond their traditional, siloed roles and become unified, end-to-end operational and business ecosystems. This evolution is not merely a technological upgrade. It represents a strategic reinvention of the business, unifying operational and commercial functions into a single, adaptive, data-driven digital nervous system.

A unified OSS/BSS ecosystem

A unified OSS/BSS ecosystem is critical for eliminating the friction that historically occurred between disparate systems.

By aligning operational and business processes, such as service provisioning, billing, order management, and customer support, you can ensure smooth workflows, consistent data flows, and faster time-to-market for new offerings.

The convergence of OSS and BSS enables a single source of truth across the organization, reducing duplication of effort, improving customer satisfaction, and strengthening brand trust.

Openness and flexibility

Modern OSS/BSS platforms are embracing openness and flexibility to operate effectively in multi-vendor, hybrid environments. This involves adopting cloud-native architectures and supporting multiple deployment models – on-premises, hybrid, or fully cloud-based – depending on business needs, regulatory constraints, and current IT landscapes.

By building with open APIs and supporting industry frameworks like the TM Forum's Open Digital Architecture (ODA), you can achieve faster integrations, promote interoperability, and reduce the costs associated with connecting diverse systems.

Intelligence-driven systems

Future OSS/BSS must be intelligence-driven. The integration of AI, machine learning, and real-time analytics will enable proactive decision-making, predictive maintenance, personalized customer experiences, and dynamic service orchestration

This intelligence strengthens operational agility and opens new revenue opportunities, particularly in emerging sectors such as smart cities, manufacturing automation, and connected healthcare.

Silobreakers

Markus Kinnunen, CIO of Elisa

Markus Kinnunen believes that a long-term commitment to continuous innovation and the re-utilization of telecom IT, combined with a staged simplification of a complex brownfield IT environment, is key to transforming decades of telecom technology into efficient and scalable digital services. This approach has enabled Elisa to fully capitalize on AI, 5G, and automation opportunities.

Read the interview

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Carlos Palito, CIO of Entel

Carlos Palito explains how the 68-year-old company has put aside failed attempts at digital transformation to reap the rewards of Entel 3.0, its clearly defined, unified transformation strategy across fixed and mobile operations in Chile and Peru.

Read the interview

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Nikos Angelopoulos, Group CIO of MTN Group

Nikos Angelopoulos believes that working closely together across multiple dimensions with different stakeholders at the centre and in the different businesses and operating companies is an essential ingredient for success in multinational operators like MTN.

Read the interview

How AI takes OSS/BSS to the next level

AI and machine learning are transforming operations and enhancing business processes.

Within OSS and BSS, AI can be applied in various ways, including network performance optimization, predictive maintenance, intelligent resource allocation, fraud detection, and personalized customer experiences.

The emerging field of Gen-AI brings additional capabilities by producing new outputs such as data-driven reports, automated network visualizations, dynamic simulations, and context-aware virtual assistants, and leverages patterns learned from existing datasets.

These advancements help streamline workflows, reduce operational costs, and drive innovation across telecommunications ecosystems.

eBrief: Maximize OSS/BSS impact with Al and Gen-AI

eBrief: Artificial intelligence, analytics, and automation

eBrief: Transform invoice anomaly detection with AI smart encoders

Tree growing inside a cave, reaching toward sunlight above.

Omdia: Driving AI enhanced business growth

Advance OSS/BSS further with cloud native

Watch Ericsson’s Mats Karlsson and AWS’s Dr. Ishwar Parulkar discuss how the cloud enables OSS/BSS to transform performance through AI and automation.

Cloud technologies are transforming the OSS/BSS ecosystem, offering the agility, flexibility, and scalability necessary to thrive in the 5G era. 

Cloud-native architectures empower you to rapidly deploy new services, scale operations seamlessly, and respond effectively to market demands. By embracing agile methodologies such as DevOps and CI/CD, cloud platforms enable continuous updates and improvements, moving beyond the limitations of traditional, infrequent software releases.

Scalability is a cornerstone of cloud-based OSS/BSS systems. It allows you to manage massive data volumes and the complexities of 5G services.

Explore cloud native

Autonomous networks are transforming operations by using AI and automation to make decisions, learn, and adapt without human input. They respond to changes in real time, based on defined business and operational intents.

With their advanced capabilities, they pave the way for reduced complexity, improved efficiency, and flexible, scalable service delivery, enabling you to meet customer demands and adapt quickly to new opportunities.

With curated data and AI/ML models, you can achieve zero-touch operations and deliver advanced services, even in multi-vendor environments.

Service orchestration is key to achieving higher levels of autonomy. It combines intent management, assurance, real-time inventory, and closed-loop automation powered by agentic AI.

The strong link between autonomous networking and orchestration creates efficient, intelligent, and adaptive connectivity ecosystems that are ready for the future.

Explore autonomous networks

Evolve OSS/BSS as you progress toward autonomous networks

Appledore: Moving towards intelligent platforms - The new role of OSS/BSS

OSS/BSS must be repositioned not as back-office systems, but as engines of growth, monetization, and customer engagement.

Read the Appledore report

Interview with Mats Karlsson, Head of Solution Area Business and Operations Support Systems, Ericsson – Courtesy of TM Forum

Shaping the future of telecom: 5G, AI, and intent-driven networks

Discover how the telecom industry is undergoing a dual paradigm shift, powered by 5G programmability and autonomous, intent-driven networks and what role OSS/BSS plays in this shift.

This interview explores five critical OSS/BSS transformation areas shaping the future:

Unlocking the true value of data
Building intelligent AI-driven applications
Streamlining service orchestration
Crafting flexible commercial models
Deploying unified charging and billing systems

Learn about innovations that are redefining customer experiences and unlocking new monetization opportunities, and hear about real-world examples of customer collaborations.

Business and Operations Support Systems portfolio visualization

Core Commerce, Orchestration, Monetization, Data and AI, Cloud and IT Services

We deliver future-proof, open, and standards-based OSS/BSS solutions that help you capitalize on 5G opportunities while enabling you to reduce time to revenue and minimize risk through a stepwise approach.

In a dynamic telecommunications world, we enhance these capabilities with new features, combining the power of data, AI, cloud, and IT modernization across commerce, service orchestration, and monetization to empower your business.

Our no-nonsense approach cuts through the hype to unlock the full potential of autonomous networks and differentiated connectivity.

Explore our solutions

Core Commerce

Support consistent and contextual catalog-driven omni-channel experience powered by intuitive journeys.

Service orchestration

Dynamically manage service orchestration. Enable zero-touch order to activation workflows.

Monetization

Monetize new revenue streams while offering increased value to end consumers and enterprises.

Data and AI

Drive insights to business outcomes with real-time, multivendor data processing, analytics and AI/ML.

OSS/BSS: Cloud and IT Services

With our OSS/BSS services, you can orchestrate new experiences, monetize smarter, and embrace the cloud. That means delivering unique services your customers love, unlocking the potential of 5G, and adapting easily when things change.

We know old models slow you down. That’s why we help you shift to approaches that bring real-time agility and measurable results. Together, we make it easier for your business to run, and to keep running in the era of autonomous networks.

We keep it simple, so you can focus on what matters: delivering great services, faster.

Explore our services

Navigate your journey to successful IT transformation

Capturing 5G value through automated orchestration journeys

Your cloud transformation journeys underpin effective innovation

Transform monetization in the 5G and autonomous network era

Read about the transformative steps and strategies many of our OSS/BSS customers take. These leaders share their efforts to remain competitive and responsive to dynamic market conditions, while successfully powering progress and monetizing 5G capital investments.