Products and Platforms
TCS HOBS™
TCS HOBS™: Engineering experiences with personalization and innovation
Highlights
- Digital transformation for Tier 2 & Tier 3 CSPs is no longer optional. It’s about speed and agility to stay competitive and unlock new revenue streams.
- Moving from heavy CapEx to flexible, subscription-based models enables faster modernisation.
- Open, modular architectures and pragmatic AI adoption accelerate time-to-market, improve customer experience, and reduce operational complexity.
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Context
The question is no longer “Should we transform?” It’s “How fast can we reinvent ourselves?” For Tier 2 and Tier 3 communications service providers (CSPs), digital transformation is not about incremental change but about creating a foundation for agility, resilience, and growth in a market defined by speed and innovation.
Yet, few constraints often slow their transformation journey:
- Limited capital that makes large CapEx projects impractical
- Fragmented OSS and BSS systems that block unified insights
- Skill shortages that hinder rapid innovation
Vendor lock-in that limits the flexibility to adopt new technologies or best-of-breed solutions.
OSS/BSS architecture: The foundation for viable transformation
For Tier 2 and Tier 3 CSPs, the transformation journey begins with a modular OSS/BSS architecture built on three pillars: Simple design, contextual intelligence, and scalable foundations.
Simple: Cloud-native and modular for agility
The shift from monolithic systems to a cloud-native, microservices-based architecture is the cornerstone of simplicity. By breaking down core functions into modular components, CSPs can eliminate the challenges of a legacy environment, accelerate updates, scale on demand, and reduce complexity.
- Reduced complexity: A subscription-based approach (Telecom-as-a-Service) democratises access to advanced capabilities without the burden of heavy CapEX.
- Frictionless updates: Decoupling the data layer allows for independent evolution of data storage and business logic, ensuring that maintenance and upgrades no longer require system-wide downtime.
Contextual: Real-time unified data for intelligent operations
Networks and customer experiences are real time. Data is only valuable when it is contextual. A unified data layer provides real-time visibility across network and customer domains, enabling predictive analytics that understand the “why” behind every event.
- Actionable insights: Instead of reactive troubleshooting, agentic AI uses real-time context to detect, predict, and resolve issues before they impact the user.
- Enhanced experiences: By closing the loop between network performance and business outcomes, CSPs can deliver hyper-personalized offers based on the customer’s current usage context and service quality.
Scalable: Open standards for interoperability
Vendor lock-in is a significant barrier to scalability. Adopting TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture (ODA) and Open APIs ensures that the architecture is built for future expansion.
- Elastic growth: Cloud-native containers enable the system to scale elastically with demand, ensuring performance during peak loads without overprovisioning.
- Ecosystem ready: This flexibility empowers CSPs to mix-and-match best-of-breed solutions and launch new services in weeks, not years—transforming the architecture into a non-linear engine for sustained growth.
Orchestrating the five core experiences
True transformation is measured not by technology alone, but by the experiences it enables. A modern OSS/BSS platform must deliver tangible improvements across five critical dimensions: Customer (CX), Agent (AX), Partner (PX), Vendor (VX), and Stakeholder (SX). Each represents a unique lever for growth and efficiency.
Customer experience (CX): Today’s customers expect more than connectivity; they expect relevance. Experience orchestration combines real-time intent with contextual insights to craft journeys that feel personal. By unifying network and business data, CSPs can move from generic offers to hyper-personalised engagement. Imagine AI predicting a family’s weekend streaming habits and proactively suggesting a tailored plan, turning data into loyalty and revenue. How to measure it: How many journeys are personalised, how many proactive offers are accepted, how often outages are predicted before customers complain.
Agent experience (AX): Agents are the frontline of customer trust. When systems are fragmented, handle times rise and first-call resolution drops. Modern platforms reduce friction through AI-driven guidance and unified views, while low-code tools empower teams to solve process gaps without waiting on IT. The result? Faster resolutions, happier customers, and measurable OpEx savings. How to measure it: Handle time, tool switching count, agent productivity, and AI-guided resolution usage.
Partner and vendor experience (PX and VX): Growth increasingly depends on ecosystems. CSPs need architectures that simplify partner onboarding, automate order flows, and enable API-driven integration for B2B2X models. For vendors, automation and closed-loop assurance ensure performance and SLA compliance across multi-vendor environments, reducing manual intervention and accelerating innovation. How to measure it: onboarding cycle time, % automated orders, vendor compliance rate.
Stakeholder experience (SX): Decision-makers need clarity, not complexity. Unified data and predictive insights enable faster, smarter decisions, aligning operational performance with strategic goals and long-term value creation. How to measure it: decision latency, forecasting accuracy, data quality thresholds.
Execution strategy: the “how” of transformation
Strategy alone doesn’t deliver transformation. Execution for Tier 2 and Tier 3 CSPs must reduce friction across vendors, funding, and data while enabling continuous evolution without structural disruption. That means rethinking how technology, capital, and intelligence are put to work.
Rethinking vendor selection
Vendor evaluation must move beyond feature-led comparisons toward criteria that reflect execution agility. Integration velocity, API maturity, and architectural modularity are stronger predictors of long-term value than functional breadth.
A practical indicator of delivery readiness is the ability to integrate with existing environments and demonstrate working outcomes within short cycles. Platforms that support incremental deployment and standards-based interoperability reduce dependency and preserve future choice.
Build exit ready architectures on open data models and loosely coupled services, so roadmap control stays with the CSP as priorities shift.
Accelerating intelligence through pragmatic approaches
AI adoption doesn’t have to start with a massive data overhaul. Instead of waiting for multi-year modernisation programs, CSPs can leverage Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). RAG combines the power of generative AI with real-time retrieval from existing sources, such as technical manuals, operational documents, and legacy systems. This means CSPs can surface accurate, context-rich insights without migrating data or rewriting the entire architecture. This approach accelerates time-to-value, reduces risk, and ensures that confidential data is not exposed to external model-training pipelines. This is ensured as there is no need to upload enterprise datasets to external model providers.
In essence, effective transformation is enabled by execution models that emphasise modularity, adaptability, and incremental value realisation, turning strategy into sustained operational impact.
Beyond the balance sheet: Systematic value creation as the new engine of monetization
The ultimate financial question is not simply how to incrementally improve quarterly revenue, but what constitutes genuine value creation in this new cycle of disruption. This pivot demands that the finance function evolve far beyond reporting and control to become the strategic enabler, actively directing capital toward organisational agility.
This involves having the courage to decommission legacy systems and strategic projects that, while successful in the past, now actively inhibit future speed and responsiveness. When capital is allocated through this lens, prioritising investments that build systemic value for both customers and the environment, the enterprise is positioned to generate compounding value. Monetisation then becomes less of a discrete transaction and more of a systemic inevitability, building a non-linear engine for sustained, future-proof growth.