brave new world of OSS/BSS (part 1)

convergence has been the ‘it’ word in OSS/BSS world, the word has changed meaning considerably over the last decade or so, in fact it has changed so much that its now used in a totally opposite way, a decade ago convergence meant that a company will have a razor sharp focus on a product and will specialize in selling/delivering that one product, now it means the ability of a company to bundle up a number of offerings.
Convergence has turned out to be a boon for the customer, since customer is now the center of the OSS/BSS world.

As a natural extension of convergence, we have seen huge advances in the way revenue management, pricing and product catalog's are being implemented in a Telco, one of the things happening is the desire of IT leadership for implementing standards based infrastructure (SOA and what not) which has intern helped management reach goals such as:

1- simplification
2- cost reduction and
3- improved ability to respond to market pressure (quick turn around time)