Microsoft in Telecom

I have spent most of my career involved in Telecommunications managing outside plant, inside plant, business and residential services, voice, data, and the people that figure it all out. Traditionally, Microsoft has made an important contribution to information worker productivity on the enterprise side, but it has not been greatly involved with the customer facing operations side of telecommunications. This is beginning to change.

During the time that service providers were wrestling with the implications of moving rapidly from the PSTN and SS7, through softswitches, network delayering, and towards IMS, an entire new world of services has emerged. Since the early 2000s, Microsoft has been introducing new technologies, new concepts for services, and new models for service delivery that leverage the concepts of Services Oriented Architectures (SOA) and Web Services. Microsoft Mediaroom, Windows Live, Office Live, Windows Mobile, Hosted Messaging & Collaboration are changing the very nature of “services”. Other market forces are challenging traditional business models and assumptions about the way services are expected to generate revenue.

The Microsoft Software + Services model and its potential for services providers requires new agility in the management of network resources, network services, and a new higher level services that need to be completely abstracted from the traditional BSS/OSS layers. The Microsoft platform is poised to play an increasing central role in the creation of these systems: the BSS, the OSS, and the way business processes are defined and assembled. Microsoft is also helping to redefine the meaning of Service Delivery Frameworks. These topics, and other miscellaneous items that may arise from time to time, will be the primary focus of this blog.