The BSS market will grow faster than the OSS market between now and 2017. This according to a new market forecast from Informa Telecoms and Media (registration required).
By 2017, the BSS market will be worth $42.8 billion (from $30.6 billion in 2013), with OSS at $31.8 billion (from $28.4 billion in 2013). These markets are tricky to predict, as not only is there definite blurring between the two but the market is changing so fast that it is a brave man to take the job on.
The report segments the sector by product and by business area.
Whilst most of the categories – implementation, software licences, training – show steady growth in the OSS side of things, in BSS the growth is more dramatic. The biggest revenue generator on this side of the house is ‘Other’ – translating to training, maintenance and support. This will account for over $20 billion by 2017.
Interestingly, Informa do not see huge growth in cloud based BSS, nor indeed OSS.
In other areas of BSS, they do see quite dramatic growth. The momentum of Managed Services, predicted to reach $5 billion by 2017, together with integration and licenses all look positive.
The report supports a number of analyses and discussions. Clearly real-time is now a priority for operators who need to ‘think like internet providers.’ This market alone will generate serious revenue over the next three to four years, with previous surveys (registration required) predicting that 87 percent of operators will be investing during the period.
Meanwhile, operators are desperate to find that differentiator and all are thinking seriously about a number of avenues and opportunities. From M2M (becoming the IoT), to mobile payments to analytics that will unlock the potential of all that big data that is flowing through their systems, the next few years are undoubtedly set to be exciting and profitable – as long as the value is properly brought to market.
Ofcourse, the main performance of the telecom OSS is to monitor the information source that the client is using. After obtaining the information, it is sent to the payments division for next level of handling.
I guess the Informa guys have been watching the Olympic hockey matches because I detect a hockey stick mentality has influenced these forecasts.
Consider this: Informa’s forecasts 8 or 9% growth in BSS over the next 4 yours while Amdocs, the leading vendor in that market by far has only grown 3 to 4% annually its last four years — and much of that by acquisition I’ll add.
I used to regularly report on the worldwide numbers for BSS/OSS software and last time I checked, the market was relatively flat or growing very modestly overall. Players come and go and the large players acquire the star performers. Others go out of business.
There’s no way, given current telecom industry economics, you’re going to see growth numbers like these.
Now I’m not saying Informa’s BSS/OSS forecasts are useless. On the contrary, these numbers are very useful to vendor salespeople who need to drop a few hockey stick graphs in their PowerPoints.
So ho