Interview Analysis

The first round of interview had first two questions related to MVNO sys- tems without introducing cloud to get idea how experts think MVNO sys- tems work. The responses obtained were ranging from the technical and operational to business perspectives. The main points from all the responses combined are given in Fig. 4.1.

The responses presented in Fig.4.2 are collected during the first round of interviews in which the structured question-answers were asked to the interviewees for mapping the MVNO systems on cloud. There were three options for interviewees to choose from and those were 1. Agree, 2. Not sure or depends and 3. Disagree. The graph below describes the responses in an analytical manner in which the MVNO systems are mentioned on x- axis while y-axis refers to the percentage response obtained in reply to the question “whether system should deployed on cloud?”

By looking at the graph in Fig.4.2, we can say that the experts were quite insistent to put self-service, CRM and bill formatter systems on cloud as to provide SaaS like environment for such applications. For Order management, Billing & CRM integrator and account receivable systems the responses had some doubts and so small portion of responses were not sure to deploy such systems on cloud. The experts thought of integration problems with other systems be the main issue in these cases. Rating and invoicing had similar responses in which close to half of them were not sure to move these systems to cloud. The interviewees mentioned data transfer as well as latency driven issues with cloud I/O and hypervisor [25] be the key concern in these cases. It’s interesting to note that all of the above mentioned systems had positive

Figure 4.1: Snapshot - MVNO systems in brief

or neutral answers which make them viable candidates for cloud after solving key issues associated with them.

Product catalog, collection and resource management had overall posi- tive responses however there were some neutral and negative reactions at the same time. Integration with external systems as well as proximity to the net- work elements drove such responses for these systems. Mediation remained a doubtful system for the possible cloud implementation as it got same number of positive and negative answers along with half of the responses as neutral or uncertain. This was because of the CDR security and transfer problems in the cloud environments. Prepaid as well as network systems got more than half of negative responses and so they remain impractical to implement on cloud as of now. This is due to a well-known fact that cloud is not ready for telecom systems to provide carrier-grade services [38].

Fig. 4.3 illustrates the same interview responses in a different manner in which it categorizes each MVNO system according to the percentage of pos- itive (“Agree”) response acquired in reply to the question “whether system should deployed on cloud?” This figure depicts almost the same picture as mentioned in analytical description of the graph. Systems with green should be moved to the cloud while systems in blue can be moved to the cloud after resolving related issues with cloud or the systems themselves. Mediation is the only system in violet and it remains suspicious for cloud implementation while prepaid, OSS and other network systems remain repulsive to move to the cloud.

MVNO systems drive several advantages which were discussed during the interview sessions with experts. The focus remained on the system per- formance and cost-benefits driven by implementation of MVNO systems on cloud. Fig. 4.4 illustrates these advantages in brief.

Figure 4.2: MVNO systems on cloud analysis

4.1.2

Application Mapping

Self-service, CRM, Order Management, Account Receivable and Resource Management can be deployed as SaaS on cloud. All these applications need a user interface for the customer service representatives and SaaS makes the deployment easy for these applications. Self-service portal is end-user facing application and it is connected to CRM, order management, account receiv- able and resource management via self-service APIs. SaaS on cloud provides possibilities to scale up and scale down the load quickly as per user sessions and so to drive cost-benefits in managing theses applications. Billing-CRM integrator, Product catalog, Rater, Invoicing and Bill formatter shall be im- plemented using PaaS on cloud as these applications are not user-facing ap- plications and most of these applications possess asynchronous background processing capabilities. In such cases, PaaS provides a platform to share re- sources among several MVNOs and in this way to drive cost-benefits. Also economy of scale and elasticity attributes of cloud help to scale the appli- cations to carry fluctuating load easily. Batch jobs processing, Mediation, Business intelligence systems can be deployed IaaS on cloud since these ap- plications need high computing as well as storage capabilities and IaaS on cloud provide such potential.

Figure 4.3: MVNO systems mapping according positive response

As described in section 2.5.1 the application mapping for MVNO busi- ness support systems [34] can be done by mapping application attributes to various cloud scenarios. Table 4.1 maps two to three main attributes to the possible cloud scenario for each application [28] and then decides whether the application should be deployed on cloud or not.

MVNO Operation

MVNO Systems

Key Attributes Cloud Scenario Deploy- able? Taking

Orders

Self-service Portal

User experience SaaS

Scalability Economy of scale Yes Availability 99% availability

CRM

Data security & ac- cess

Security issues (hybrid cloud helps)

Online data SaaS Yes

Affordability Administration cost- cut

Order

Management

Transaction/data locking

Data lock-in problems Complex integra-

tion & customiza- tion

Critical Integration obstacles

Depends

Load balancing Hybrid cloud Integration

Billing & CRM Integrator

Transaction man- agement & persis- tency

Unpredictable perfor- mance

Scalability Elasticity on cloud Depends

Product Catalog Configuration man- agement Configuration issues on cloud

Online data SaaS Depends

Processing

Bills Mediation

Data transfer Data transfer bottle- necks

Batch processing Efficient batch- processing

No Data security Security breaches on

cloud Rating Configuration man- agement Configuration issues on cloud

Batch processing Efficient batch- processing

Depends Offline data Hybrid cloud

Invoicing

Scalability Elasticity of cloud Batch process-

ing (compute- intensive)

Efficient batch- processing & compu- tation

Yes

Monitoring & af- fordability Administration cost- cut Bill Formatter Physical device data transfer

Data transfer bottle- necks

Batch processing Efficient batch- processing Yes Collecting Payments Account Receivable

Online data SaaS

Data security Data security issues on cloud

Yes Availability 99% availability

Collection

Data locking & se- curity

Data lock-in and secu- rity problems on cloud

Integration Integration obstacles Depends Batch processing Efficient batch-

processing Inventory Resource

Management

Online data SaaS Integration / con-

figuration

Integration & configu- ration issues on cloud

Yes Cost-sharing Cost-beneficial imple-

mentation on cloud Prepaid Operation Real-time Charging High availability (carrier-grade) 99% availability - not feasible

High performance Performance unpre- dictability

No Integration Integration challenges Table 4.1: Analysis for mapping MVNO systems attributes on cloud scenarios