Your Telecom Software Vendor’s Business Stability Matters—Here’s How Much

Loss of Product Support and Roadmap

When a software vendor undergoes restructuring, it may lead to sudden changes in priorities. That includes the products it supports-and potentially its products you're using. What if the vendor reduces investment in those products? Or decides to sunset them altogether?

Generally speaking, reduced technical support and updates can create software vulnerabilities and performance issues, deteriorating your vendor's product quality and reliability over time. You may find that urgent customer issues can no longer be resolved with timely bug fixes and software updates.

When it comes to telco software, however, reduced support presents rather specific hazards.

Financial impacts

Losing product support can cause similar cash flow issues to those described above-namely, those that arise from your inability to get timely and accurate payments from roaming partners. You would also need to factor in the costs associated with manual workarounds and, if it comes to it, finding and integrating a replacement software vendor.

Data security risks

If your vendor's security measures lapse, prepare for your risk of data breaches to rise-especially if the vendor hosts data. If your vendor fails to comply with GSMA standards, you as the operator could primarily be held responsible by the partner operator. Data security lapses also expose your business to financial risks and legal complications. You may have to then navigate contract terminations and seek legal remedies that drain the organization.

Lagging behind industry standards

Consider the GSMA-mandated changes to standards and roaming procedures. These cover most aspects of the roaming business, including roaming steering, roaming testing and roaming settlement, to mention a few, and they can't be implemented without committed, year-on-year financial investment in a product roadmap. What happens when your vendor can't keep up and fails to implement these GSMA-standard changes?

• Damaged trust with international roaming partners (i.e., other operators in foreign countries)
• Inaccuracy in settlement that could result in unpredictable roaming costs/revenues (any manual overhead would make the partner settlements inefficient)
• Lack of visibility into roaming data, which could disadvantage you when it comes to negotiating profitable roaming agreements
• Exposure in internal and external audits, which can uncover non-compliance resulting from outdated or poor-quality software
• Difficulty leveraging new 5G/IoT use cases (e.g., the ones predicated on quality), resulting in failure to monetize new revenue streams
• Poor customer experience due to network quality issues arising from poor network testing
• Network performance issues and uncertainty resulting from poor-quality testing software

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