Light Reading Podcasts

By 2027, analysts at Omdia expect the telco IT market to exceed $40 billion, up from $31 billion in 2021. James Crawshaw, practice leader for Omdia, joins the podcast to explain how the OSS/BSS market thrived during the pandemic, and why service providers are investing in improving automation and customer experience for their OSS/BSS platforms.

"It's not historically been a particularly high growth market, this OSS and BSS space is fairly mature," said Crawshaw. However, he explained that despite the pandemic forcing many to work from home, IT teams "had no trouble" implementing IT projects remotely.

"The other positive thing for the market has been that operators have really wanted to up their game in terms of making the customer experience more digital and more streamlined," he added.

The result of this market momentum still hasn't resulted in "hypergrowth," said Crawshaw. But, many OSS/BSS suppliers are now "looking at 8% growth in their business. And for many years, it was trundling along at 2%."

You can download an unedited transcript of the podcast here. If you want to skip around and listen, here are a few more things covered in this interview:

• Growth in telecom IT market for OSS/BSS (01:26)
• Fastest growth segments within the OSS/BSS market (05:43)
• Moving OSS/BSS applications to the public cloud (09:43)
• Recommendations for service providers (11:53)
• Impact of 5G on IT (14:19)
• Why tier 2 and 3 operators are underserved by the bigger OSS/BSS vendors (18:23)
• Whether hyperscalers will subsume the OSS/BSS market (19:59)

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