As service providers move towards next generation of infrastructure, they need the tools and systems to solve the operational and technical issues that they encounter. Challenges include: 

• The complexity of existing business, operations and infrastructural systems impedes service providers – The complexity of current operational support systems hinders their day-to-day operations, including:
  
  Modelling & viewing services – This currently necessitates querying and managing data held in multiple systems. Costs increase due to the brittleness of typical integration code, uncontrolled changes in external systems and the difficulty of joining up disparate systems with traditional coding techniques.
  
  Summarising data integrity – As systems are not joined up, but nevertheless overlap, errors and omissions in data can steadily grow unnoticed.
  
  Managing service impact analysis – With data not joined up, and the lack of an explicit service model, understanding service dependencies and analysing the effects they have on various services or customers, increases in difficulty.
  
  
• Commercial services need to be more focused - The IT and communication needs of the end-customer are paramount, not the requirements of the individual technology silos.
   
• Data-to-service relationships need to be less blurred - The link between equipment, and the equipment’s faults, services & outages needs to be explicitly defined. Previously separated between individual silos, but increasingly rationalised as a common network backbone using IP augmented with MPLS (IP/MPLS), data services are becoming more complex to analyse and diagnose. 
  
  
• Service providers and Data Center IT providers are converging to deliver end-to-end managed services- Previously a model more akin to the IT services delivered by enterprise data centers, traditional telecommunications organisations now have to diversify the services they supply. 
  
  
• P2P techniques fail to organise disparate systems into a unified model Although seemingly expedient, point to point integrations lack flexibility, severely curtailing the information which can be shared between systems and they scale poorly with the number of systems involved in typical infrastructures. When service providers add new OSS applications, their infrastructure complexity and hence maintenance costs, quickly grow. 
  
  
• ‘Big Bang’ OSS transformation programmes are inherently risky and costly - Several notable projects have been less than successful, and once deployed, the tools implemented are often inflexible.
  

Operational support systems are growing in complexity, technologies are converging, and markets are escalating in competitiveness. Coupled with a reliance on legacy systems, service providers are increasingly immobilised by the perceived risks and costs associated with managing their environments. As such, many organisations believe that the challenges posed by transforming their OSS are too difficult to overcome.  

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