Clarity, the market leader in Unified Operational Support Systems (OSS), celebrates its fifteenth anniversary this month. Its founder, Tony Kalcina, looks back at Clarity’s success and forward to see where the OSS industry will be in another fifteen years.

Founded in 1994 with just twelve people, Clarity’s core vision was to create a Unified OSS that could replace the standard approach of individual teams working in separate silos and systems focused on technology with little consideration of the customer experience. Clarity’s early partnership with The Malaysian Telecom Company (Time) encouraged it to leap-frog the classical approach to telecoms management and develop its core product – a system capable of automating all the horizontal operations of a telecom network and focusing on quality-of-service.

Clarity quickly attracted customers across Asia and Australia and a 60% share of Clarity was bought by Powerlan in 1999. After its successful flotation on the Australian stock market, multi-million dollar tenures were won with Taiwan Fixed Network, PLDT in the Philippines and Reliance Communications in India. Clarity went from strength to strength as Unified OSS began to be recognised as more effective and less expensive than trying to integrate up to 24 disparate “best of breed” systems, as well as presenting a higher chance of success. In 2005, Clarity introduced Java and a three-tier architecture to the product, a process of revision and improvement which continues today.

“Today, we look forward to a future that will see the OSS industry really focus on customer usability and quality of service. We put our success down to making ourselves tremendously easy to do business with and knowing what our customers need. We’re acutely aware of systems integrator’s obligations to telecom operators and, in turn, operator’s service obligations to their customers. Celebrating 15 years of successful growth is testament to the success of the Unified OSS market as a whole as well as a clear endorsement of Clarity’s business model, which we hope will thrive for another 15 years”, said Tony Kalcina, Chief Product Officer of Clarity.

Tony Kalcina’s predictions for the next 15 years:

• Unified OSS for telecom operators will evolve into cross-industry operational management solutions
• These solutions will be used not just by telecom companies, but also by utility companies and enterprises to manage their computer networks and systems
• One operational management solution will connect enterprises, utilities and individual homes

“Clarity is already being approached by major utility companies who have realised that the system they have installed to mange their internal telecoms infrastructure is the same technology they need to manage their grid, metres and customer data. To them, Clarity is a perfect match for their enterprise management needs and this is a realisation that will only spread with time” commented Kalcina.

With long-established customers across the Asia-Pacific region, Clarity is now expanding into the Middle East while working to create a complete service delivery platform that can manage customer self-management, cataloguing, auto-management, quality of service, fulfilment and assurance. Clarity is also instituting new technologies to provide even greater automation, through purchasing source code like the Viper Wholesale Service Delivery Platform.

About Clarity
Clarity is the market leader in Unified Operational Support Systems (OSS), managing over 120 million subscribers globally in Tier 1 incumbent and next generation Telcos. Clarity provides proven, pre-integrated Inventory, Fulfilment and Assurance applications on a single SID based database, enabling real-time executive visibility of the network’s impact on revenues and customer experience. Clarity is network and service neutral, driven by templates and workflows that are rapidly configurable, allowing telecom companies to cut time to market for new services by two-thirds.

Established in 1994, Clarity has offices in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and North America. For more information, please visit www.clarity.com.