The 3rd annual Frost & Sullivan OSS/BSS Asia Pacific summit kick-started today in Singapore. The two day summit which will host senior members of Asia Pacific telecom industry will combine a rich mix of practical implementation successes along with analyst insights from global market research.

Manoj Menon, partner and managing director for Asia Pacific at Frost & Sullivan opened the two-day summit with a welcome address followed by a keynote speech by Jim Peters, chief architect, service fulfilment and workflow platform of BT Design. Jim shared BT’s success story on becoming more customer-centric by deploying capabilities that helped them to address their customer’s business needs.

Strategy to succeed in the current economic climate is the underlying theme of presentations and panel discussions at the summit. Communications Service Providers (CSPs) are looking at their vendors to deliver Operations Support Systems and Business Support Systems (OSS/BSS) support and solutions that make the most of what they have. Although large transformation efforts continue, there are many more smaller efforts to quickly reduce operations’ expenditures and squeeze more value out of existing infrastructure investments.

Senior consulting analyst from Stratecast a division of Frost & Sullivan, Karl Whitelock presented market insights on the current trends in OSS/BSS and shared the results of a joint survey conducted by official media partner Telecom Asia and Stratecast. ”The survey results clearly show that CSPs are focused on service quality, implementing improvements in network capabilities and timely support of new services. In accomplishing this focus, the major OSS/BSS functions presently receiving the most attention include customer self care, customer experience management, revenue assurance and business analytics,” says Karl.

He further adds, that in comparison to last year’s survey results, self care and customer experience management continue to lead the list of business concerns, but noticeably receiving less attention was billing rating and charging. “We believe this is a direct result of many CSPs that have either completed or will soon complete many essential billing systems upgrades.” sums Karl.

Topics such as transforming to customer centricity, understanding & assuring the customer experience, the what-why-how of customer experience management; will be covered through a variety of interactive case studies and panel discussions over the two days.

Over the past year, organizations have increased the use of customer-based analytics for marketing and product development reasons. They continue to gain understanding from multiple data sources; primarily those from billing and CRM systems. Susan McNeice, program manager of OSS BSS global competitive strategies (OSSCS) at Stratecast will share updates of the CSP survey results on the second day of the summit. She will elaborate on the general expectations concerning analytics from Stratecast’s most recent analysis activities.

Commenting on highlights of her presentation, Susan says, “Operators around the world are increasing their use of advanced and predictive data analytics as part of their overall strategy to gain a competitive advantage. They are using the techniques in play at major retailers to understand buying behaviors as a key input to promotional campaigns and new product development.”

“We’re still at the very beginning of the learning curve, but I expect to see this take off in the next three to five years, particularly in the mature markets. Now is the time for operators to lay the groundwork for their future success,” commented Susan.

To create, communicate and connect, a participant driven think-tank session on customer experience management will also be introduced at the second day of the summit. Towards the end of the summit, thought leaders from Oracle Corporation, NetCracker & Stratecast will voice their opinions concerning the next wave of customer services based on continuously evolving network and user device technologies coupled with changing business strategies of the major services companies.

The summit is sponsored by Oracle Communications, Comverse, Convergys, Netezza, Ixia, Accanto Systems and Anritsu. The official media partners for the summit include Billing & OSS supplement, Telecom Asia and Wireless Asia. Other media partners for the summit are International BillingOSS, China Newswire, China Tech News.com, Connect World, Convergence World, Developing Telecoms, mCubeDigital.com, OSS News Review and Wireless Business Review.

Global Revenue Assurance Professional Association (GRAPA) and ITU-APT Foundation of India are the supporting associations for the summit and PR Newswire is the official Newswire.

For more information on the summit, please visit www.frost-oss.com.

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