Next 18 months 'critical': Telstra CIO

The next 18 months would be a "critical" time in Telstra's ongoing transformation of its operational support systems (OSS), the telco's chief information officer John McInerney said today.

For Telstra, the next eighteen months is critical. It's really where the rubber hits the road for us from an OSS perspective.

Telstra CIO John McInerney

Most of the talk on the company's five year transformation has focused on billing systems and customer relationship management systems, according to McInerney, despite the fact the OSS lay at the heart of what telco's do.

"I must admit it's not one of the sexiest topics going around in the industry, but it's really important," he told CommsDay's Sydney conference. "It's effectively the thing from a telco perspective that makes us tick."

The next eighteen months were going to be a hot spot of activity for the systems, the CIO said, with planned outcomes to include benefits such as speedier time to market and reduced operating costs.

"We've got some very significant drops for our OSS over the next few months," McInerney said. The systems for mobiles would be tackled in the next few months with vendors Amdocs and Oracle's MetaSolv, while the next twelve months would take on broadband services, with the same vendors. Then McInerney intended on dealing with alarming and provisioning.

"For us, for Telstra, the next eighteen months is critical. It's really where the rubber hits the road for us from an OSS perspective," McInerney said.

Telstra has been using out of the box products, which McInerney admitted had its own challenges, but said that Telstra had decided to go that way so that it would be on those vendors technology roadmap.

When asked generally about the things he would do again during the five year transformation, McInerney said that he would have focused more on simplification at the start of the project since he said he had spent too much time replicating legacy in the new systems. "Testing forty years of legacy is difficult," he said.