Clarity Case Study

Reliance Case Study

Unified OSS

How Lean Operations and High Growth

Have Worked for Reliance
2 |Reliance Case Study

Rajeev Singhal
Rajeev Singhal has more than 10 years experience in Operations and IT divisions in the Telecom
Industry. He has traveled extensively across the globe and has worked with leading mobile
operators in Europe and North America. Rajeev has been instrumental in setting up key systems
and business processes for a greenfield operator. He has experience in integration across CRM,
Billing, GIS and a host of network elements in voice and next generation data networks. Rajeev
heads the design and development of OSS applications portfolio spanning Global, Enterprise,
Broadband and 2G Wireless Services at Reliance Communications which is one of the worlds
largest and fastest growing telecommunications service provider.
Rajeev holds a B. Engg (Hons) in Electronics and Telecommunications from Allahabad University
and an MBA from N.M.I.M.S Mumbai.
Rajeev Singhal is the Head of OSS for Reliance Communications

This paper is based on a case study, presented by Rajeev Singhal, OSS Head, Reliance
Communications, at the Frost and Sullivan OSS BSS Asia Pacific Summit, March
2008, Singapore.
 3 | Reliance Case Study

Introduction These pressures have led Reliance to avoid the

“India is still basking in the
glow of becoming the world's
fastest-growing mobile phone
market," said Kalcina. "Last
year alone, the number of
mobile phone subscribers in
India nearly doubled from the
previous year to reach almost
150 million. With the market
growing at about 6 million
new subscribers every month, this market is set to
double again in size in the next couple of years. Needless
to say, this is putting tremendous pressure on operators
to implement systems that are not only extremely
scalable, but also allow them to realise the profits
associated with this extraordinary growth."
Tony Kalcina, Executive Director, Clarity
International
traditional “best-of-breed” OSS approach and
focus instead on “Unified OSS”. By doing so,
Reliance has simplified an original OSS design
based on 17 COTS products into an
implementation of 1 COTS product. This has
vastly simplified integration and data
synchronisation, reduced deployment costs and
time-scales and reduced long-term maintenance
costs.
Reliance selected Clarity’s Unified OSS to help
them face these challenges and with the
support of Clarity, Reliance now have over 30
million subscribers and are anticipating 50
million subscribers in the next 12-18 months.
With growth being critical to the business,
Reliance and Clarity are jointly benchmarking
the OSS for 100 million subscribers.

In India, Reliance is facing challenges that are

making lean operations and scalability for rapid
growth an essential for their business rather
than an aspiration.

Most significant is an ARPU of $8 per month;

this ARPU is expected to be less than 50% that
of Europe’s for the foreseeable future.

Second is the rapid growth of the subscriber

base. Although necessary to achieve a viable
business case on the low ARPU, it places
stresses on the OSS which are rarely seen
elsewhere in the world.

Third is the geographical spread of the

network. India covers over 3 million square km,
and 70% of the population is in rural areas. The
network build-out to provide coverage to 1
With Tele-density of around 2% and around 70%
billion humans and management of the of the population in rural areas, Reliance were
infrastructure is a major challenge. quick to see the potential for rapid growth

Finally, competition is continually challenging Reliance is proof that NGOSS benefits can be
Reliance to develop new products for the achieved with Unified OSS.
increasingly technology aware and demanding
Indian subscriber base.
4 |Reliance Case Study
Reliance – The Largest Capacity
Mobile Network in the World
While many operators grow their network
with demand, the Indian market demands a
different approach. Growth and capture of
market share is the most important factor in
supporting a business case based on low ARPU.
Consequently, Reliance built a network first,
benchmarked to support 135 million subscri-
bers, and then focused on achieving high
utilisation through subscriber growth.
Reliance mobile services cover 97% of the urban
population and 42% of the rural population.
Coverage is growing through aggressive roll-out
The network is large by any standards:
• It provides coverage to 90% of India’s
population of 1 billion through over
18,000 BTS, growing to over 23,000 BTS
by March 2009, and more than 130 SDH
rings
• Over 230,000 km of IP carrying fibre and
electrical cables create a high bandwidth
mesh over the Indian sub-continent
• Increasing coverage to over 23,000 towns
and 450,000 villages
• It represents an initial infrastructure
investment of $9B
• 110,000 km of submarine assets of the
Flag Global Submarine network is
incorporated.
The Need for a New Approach to
OSS – Unified OSS
The OSS to manage such a network, in a
dynamic environment like India, has to react to
unique market and technology pressures:
• Low ARPU places the emphasis on high
levels of operational efficiency, rapid roll-
out of services to achieve market share
and “critical mass” for the subscriber base
• A network covering a huge geographical
area places the focus on automation
where possible, and “intelligent” and
centralised management of manual
activities
• Technology aware and discerning
subscribers demand new services which
Reliance must deliver to defend market
share.
Initial designs for the OSS, based on best
practice of the time – integrating “best-of-
breed” COTS products – was seen as being
too time-consuming to deploy and too
cumbersome to operate in the Indian market
place.
Monthly subscriber growth for Mobile in India
regularly exceeds China. Every month wasted
would have huge impact on Reliance market
share
 5 | Reliance Case Study

SLA Management
Network Planning
Fault Ticket Management

Re-active Management of Service Network Design

Network Alarms and Faults Infrastructure
Assurance Network Installation
Pro-active Management
of Network Trends Network Optimization
Monitor Design
Problem Identification CLARITY
CLARITY OSS
OSS
and Troubleshooting Network Capacity
YOUR BUSINESS Management
Real-time Network and CATALYST
Service Monitoring
(Network Performance /
Service Quality)

Workforce Management Service Fulfillment Network and Service

Inventory Management
Self Provisioning Deliver
Automated / Flow-through Service Configuration
Provisioning and Activation
Service Testing

Unified OSS supports the business from design, through deliver and into assurance

Reliance had the vision to define their
“idealised OSS”, and then look for a single
COTS solution which replaced the 17 “best-of-
breed” products. Reliance’s “idealised OSS”
would:
• Allow simplification and consolidation of
end-to-end processes for concept to
market, order to cash, and trouble to
resolve
• Avoid the inherent restrictions of a “best-
of-breed” architecture incurred through
high integration and data synchronisation
costs and latencies
• Align to NGOSS principles of single
information model and integration bus
and eTOM aligned functional modules
• Stretch the supply chain as far as possible,
from warehouse and equipment supplier
to the end-customer; documenting,
monitoring, improving the process at each
step
Reliance selected Clarity International’s Unified
OSS as the platform for achieving these
features; providing OSS support across
Reliance’s Design, Deliver and Assurance
process steps.
Exploiting the Unified OSS to
Achieve NGOSS-Style Benefits
Key drivers for Reliance’s OSS are:
• Huge potential subscriber base
• Largely rural population
• Low ARPU
• Increasingly discerning subscriber
• Intense competition from incumbent
regional operators
• Pressures to create RoI for the major
network build.
In the short term, this drove the OSS to
provide fast introduction into service, high
operational efficiency, scalability and required a
strong partnership with the OSS vendor.
In the longer term, the OSS must also focus on
reducing time-to-market, focus on customer
experience, enable convergence in the network
and allow Reliance to become self sufficient.
While these benefits are inherent in the
NGOSS architecture, Reliance achieved these
through a “Unified OSS” rather than a
traditional “best-of-breed” approach.
6 |Reliance Case Study

CRM Billing ERP

Customer Handling Processes

Business Provisioning Surveillance / Assurance Billing ERP

Development

Customer
CUSTOMER Order Problem
LAYER
Sales
Handling Handling
QoS Invoicing Financials Unified OSS, based
Management
on Clarity’s OSS
Service
Service
Service Service
Rating and
product, replaces
SERVICE Planning / Problem Quality HR
LAYER Development
Configuration
Resolution Management
Discounting 17 COTS products
in Reliance’s OSS
Network Network Network
NETWORK
Planning /
Network
Inventory Maintenance
Network
Data
Asset architecture
LAYER Provisioning Management
Development Management & Restoration Management

Connection Technology / Interface to Domain / Element Managers

Clarity Fulfillment Clarity Assurance

Faster Introduction into Service • July 03 – 1 million new mobile subscribers

in 10 days
Reliance simplified their OSS design, replacing • October 03 – Largest mobile operator
17 COTS products by 1 - Clarity’s Unified OSS, within India in 7 months of launch.
- bringing their OSS into service only 9 months
from the project start. This has lead to Operational Efficiencies
important business benefits: Growth in Faults Managed per Account
120000 350

• Saving of an estimated $200 million on 300

100000
integration and data synchronisation costs

Faults per Account

Num ber of Faults

250
80000
• Reduction in OSS delivery time-scale by 200
60000
an estimated 2 years. 150
40000
Days to Deliver Orders on Fixed Line Business Services 100
1000000 120.00% 20000 50
N um be r of O rde rs Com ple te d

100000 100.00% 0 0
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24
10000 80.00%
To tal Faults Created Faults per A ccount

1000 60.00%
Reliance have trebled their NOC fault
100 40.00%
management efficiency in two years
10 20.00%

1 0.00%
When ARPU is low, operational efficiency is of
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 key importance. Reliance have achieved end-to-
Total Orders Closed
M odify Orders Closed
Provisioning Orders Closed
Delete Orders Closed
end process automation for the order-to-cash
and trouble-to-resolve processes while con-
80% of all fixed line business orders are cept-to-market process time-scales have been
completed by day 1, 90% by day 3, and 99% by the significantly reduced. Clarity’s Unified OSS has
end of two weeks played a major part in this success.
This allowed Reliance to gain early market A practical measurement of efficiency is the
share through high performance provisioning ratio of subscribers to staff with Reliance
on day one and led to an early generation of comparing well with European and Asian
revenue to offset the $9 billion investment: mobile operators.
 7 | Reliance Case Study

It is no accident that Reliance has maintained • Achieve 100% automation of the voice
such high efficiency – it is a pre-requisite for provisioning process
making the business successful in a low ARPU • Execute over 1,000 parallel provisioning
environment. processes, achieving a steady-state rate of
6 provisions per second for mobile
The Reliance NOC contributes to operational services.
efficiency by providing a centralised orches-
tration of fault, maintenance, performance, M
th e a n a
provisioning, field-force and SLA operations Process
Execution Control
B u g in g
s in
es
across the whole of India. Process
s

Improvements Be
Monitoring and n
th e c h m
Visibility of KPIs B u a rk
s in ing
ARPU Subscriber to Exception
es
s
($ per Month) Staff Ratio Identification Predictability of
Reliance 8 1750 Process I
th e m p r o
Performance B u v ing
Typical Asian 18 1600 s in
es
Typical European 48 900 More
s

Reliance operates in a low ARPU environment
and efficiently delivers service through a lean
operation
This 110K square feet facility with 200 feet of
video wall comprising 160 screens displays
Clarity OSS network and service information
to over 200 users.
Reliance has used Clarity to:
• Implement 110 end-to-end provisioning
processes, from CRM order entry
through to network action
• Support over 900 problem types
Competitive and
Sophisticated SLAs
Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF);
Mean Time to Restore Service (MTRS);
Mean Time to Respond;
Max Time to Restore (MTTR);
Max Number of Interruptions (MNOI);
Max Time To Respond;
Max Unavailability Time (MUT);
Reliance not only monitors process efficiency;
they use this information as a means to
constantly challenge the market in India to offer
more aggressive SLAs
Clarity’s comprehensive process monitoring
and audit tools and its SLA Manager allow
Reliance to continually monitor the customer
experience, improve the process and commit
to more aggressive SLAs, so gaining a
competitive edge.
8 |Reliance Case Study

Orders on Fixed Line Business Services (18 day period)

Reduced Time to Market 100000

10000

The increasingly discerning Indian subscriber

N um be r of O rde rs
1000
challenges Reliance to offer innovative services
and features. The price of failure for Reliance is 100

a loss of market share. Unified OSS provides a 10

consolidated end-to-end view of processes and
allows Reliance to be agile: 1
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
Provisioning Orders Raised M odify Orders Raised
• 12-15 new products or feature sets Delete Orders Raised Rolling Average

introduced into the OSS per year for

provisioning, fault, performance and SLA 12,000 fixed line orders are raised per day, with
management around 80% as upgrades to existing customers
and 15% new customer services
• Average of 6-8 weeks to deploy a new
product and only 2 weeks to deploy a
new feature into the OSS. The Customer Experience
Reliance has not only been able to grow; it has The customer experience is increasingly
been able to retain market share through this important to Indian subscriber. Not only have
growth and a result of rapidly developing new Reliance been able to demonstrate efficiency of
products and features and supporting these in operations; they are also providing high quality
its OSS. services; and proving this to their customers
through portals.
Contract

A d he ren ce to S L As
Customer

P ro ac tiv e N ot ific at ion

o f Cu st o m er Im p act s
Service

P ro ac tiv e N ot ific at ion

o f S erv ice Q ual ity
Network

Cu st o m er E q u ip me nt
F a ult s

T h e U n i fie d O S S V i e w o f th e E x p o s e d to C us tom e r i n
C u s to m e r E x p e rie n c e R e a l-t im e th ro ug h P ort a l

Clarity’s OSS provides Network, Service, Customer, and Contract views of data into a customer portal
 9 | Reliance Case Study

Clarity’s Unified OSS is a key enabler in Convergent Network Management

managing the customer experience. It provides
a pre-integrated end-to-end solution from Reliance has been successful in managing both
gathering alarms and performance data, their fixed and mobile businesses from the
managing the resolution of problems and Unified OSS. This has allowed Reliance to
handling of customer queries through trouble- further improve their efficiency through:
tickets, SLA management through to presen-
tation to a portal. • Multiple skilling of operations staff, with
30% of the staff implementing both fixed
Closed Fault Reports
100000 and mobile processes
10000
• Reduction in the number of management
platforms to be administrated and
Faults C lose d

1000 maintained
100
• Consolidated management of the core
network; used to support both mobile
10 and fixed service traffic.
1 Reliance use Clarity’s unified OSS to:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 212223 24 25 26 27 2829 30
Closed Fault Reports • Deliver 30 product bundles including both
fixed and mobile service elements and
Reliance can resolve 75% of faults in 1 day, 90% by
day 2. 99% of faults are resolved within 2 weeks exploit OSS convergence further in NGN
services over WiMAX and IMS
Unified OSS contributes in maintaining this • Centrally manage the core network;
view of the customer, and improving the which supports both mobile and fixed
customer’s experience: network data
• Pre-integrated SLA management, • Manage the 5 wireless and 15 wireline
incorporating mean-time-to-restore, network interface types from one OSS.
-resolve, -response, -provide,
max-number-of-faults and maximum- Scalability
service-interruption in the assessment of
the customer’s experience At Reliance, the Unified OSS has had to scale
massively, rapidly and smoothly in order to
• Automated actions resulting from SLA achieve “critical mass” for the subscriber base.
threshold breaches, helping to prioritise
Subscriber Growth, 2006 - 2007
problems that will cause SLA violations if 25
left unchecked
Subscribers (millions)

20

• Integration of planned event, SLA and 15

customer facing trouble-ticket
10
management to intelligently handle
5
planned outages.
0
The Unified OSS exposes this information to a 2QFY06 3QFY06 4QFY06 1QFY07

portal using a set of open APIs. Reliance regularly achieves more than 1 million
new subscribers per month; March and
December 06 topping 1.4 million each
10 |Reliance Case Study

Current Loading Benchmarked Loading

• 30m subscribers • 100m subscribers
• 100m network ports • 200m network ports
• 1.4m circuits • 3m circuits
• 8,000 Points of • 10,000 Points of Growth to 100M
Presence Presence subscribers
• 65,000 sites • 100,000 sites dramatically
• 18,500 BTS 18 months of increases the load
• 30,000 BTS on the OSS to
smooth transition
• 1,500 concurrent • 2,000 concurrent handle orders and
minimising:
users users alarms
• Customer impact
• 1.5m events per day • IT costs • 3m events per day
• 14,500 activations per • Management • 40,000 activations per
hour interruptions hour
• Subscriber growth at • Subscriber growth at
1.5 to 2m subscribers 3.5 to 4m subscribers
per month per month

Over half a decade, Reliance has grown to over User Empowerment and Vendor
30 million subscribers from a standing start. Partnership
This has tested the OSSs ability to provision,
upgrade and assurance subscriber services. Self-sufficiency has been important for Reliance
as they grow. While Clarity has supported
Reliance is looking to the future and with Reliance through their growth, sometimes,
support from Clarity is benchmarking to change needs to be affected by those who are
prepare the OSS for the 100 million subscriber closest to the challenge. Reliance are now
mark. The intention is to smoothly transition completely self-sufficient in their OSS, relying
to this next stage in the OSS architecture over on Clarity only for technical back-office support
an 18 month period whilst maintaining and upgrades. For example, Reliance has
provisioning at an increasingly aggressive rate. implemented over 900 reports to support their
Number of Faults MIS (Management Information Systems).
12000

10000 Clarity has supported this move towards

independence and has even made use of
N u m b e r o f Fau lts

8000
Reliance innovation on collaborative projects.
6000 In all respects, the relationship between
4000 Reliance and Clarity is all that an
operator/OSS-vendor should be.
2000

0 OSS, More than an Engineering

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
Number of Fault Reports Rolling Average Necessity
The traditional view of OSS is that of an
Reliance manage 8,500 service and network faults engineering necessity – a tool which is required
to resolution a day for their fixed network
to keep the network operational. Like a
spanner.
 11 | Reliance Case Study

Reliance have shown how a Unified OSS can Massively scalable. In many respects, this shows
add business value in its own right by a possible future for many operators working in
contributing directly to the resolution of the lower ARPU environments, and will become
challenges faced by the business, not just applicable world-wide as the effects of ARPU
technology issues. reduction start to bite.
Benefit Op- Cap- Customer Market
These are the types of benefits that the TMF ex ex Experience Position
NGOSS promises. But, thanks to their initial Faster Yes
vision, Reliance has achieved this without the Introduction to
Service
cost and time-scale implications of integrated Improved Yes Yes
“Best-of-Breed” and have, instead, implemented Operational
a Unified OSS. Efficiency
Faster Time- Yes
to-Market for
In fact, Unified OSS has been significant in New Products
helping Reliance achieve its business needs: Focus on Yes Yes
Customer
• Rapid start-up of service and capture of Experience
market share Convergent Yes Yes Yes

• Highly efficient operations Scalability Yes Yes

• Able to rapidly introduce new products Empowerment Yes

of User
and features
Unified OSS, by Clarity, has contributed to
Reliance’s business

“Many operators are re-architecting their “best-of-breed” OSS to achieve growth at the levels that Reliance has
maintained using a single OSS product running on readily available platforms. Clarity has enabled Reliance to automate
major elements of the end-to-end processes without the crippling integration overhead. Data synchronization issues
which would start to dominate over performance as the subscriber base grows is simply not a problem with Clarity’s
single information model”

Sumit Chowdry, Chief Information Officer, Reliance Communications

 12 |Reliance Case Study

About Reliance Communications

Reliance Communications Limited founded by the late Shri. Dhirubhai H Ambani (1932-2002) is the
flagship company of the Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group. The Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani
Group currently has a market capitalization of over Rs. 3,00,000 crore, net worth in excess of Rs.
40,000 crore, cash flows of Rs. 9,000 crore, net profit of Rs. 5,000 crore and zero net debt.

Rated among "Asia's Top 5 Most Valuable Telecom Companies", Reliance Communications is India's
foremost and truly integrated telecommunications service provider. The company, with a customer
base of over 40 million including over 1.3 million individual overseas retail customers, ranks among the
Top 10 Asian Telecom companies by number of customers. Reliance Communications' corporate
clientele includes 600 Indian and 250 multinational corporations, and over 200 global carriers.

Reliance Communications has established a pan-India, next generation, integrated (wireless and
wireline), convergent (voice, data and video) digital network that is capable of supporting best-of-class
services spanning the entire infocomm value chain, covering over 13,000 towns and 500,000 villages.
Reliance Communications owns and operates the world's largest next generation IP enabled
connectivity infrastructure, comprising over 165,000 kilometers of fibre optic cable systems in India,
USA, Europe, Middle East and the Asia Pacific region.

For further information on Reliance Communications, visit www.rcom.co.in

About Clarity
Clarity is the telecommunication industry’s Operational Support System (OSS) business process
automation company – providing a pre-integrated product and database that streamlines the 17 eTOM
elements of OSS into a single suite. This also allows Clarity to provide executive visibility of the
network's impact on revenue and customer experience across both service fulfillment and assurance.

Having simplified the management of both legacy and next-generation network environments, Clarity
OSS is network and services neutral, driven by templates that are rapidly configurable to allow
operators to cut time to market for any new service by two-thirds. Today Clarity simplifies network
support for over 90 million subscribers worldwide.

Established in 1993, Clarity’s global headquarter is in Sydney, Australia, with offices in Asia, the Middle
East, Europe and North America

For more information, please visit us at www.clarity.com

CLARITY INTERNATIONAL LIMITED

LEVEL 41 NORTH POINT TOWER

100 MILLER STREET
NORTH SYDNEY NSW 2060
AUSTRALIA

TEL: +61 2 9925 5000

FAX: +61 2 9955 9999