The conversation around the significant industry growth engines of operational transformation and mobile broadband ruled the day at B/OSS Live!, and so it’s perhaps ironic that a pair of mega-mergers in the $9.1 billion OSS/BSS space will streamline vendor positions in both of those areas.

The U.S. is in its most prolonged economic slump since Al Capone was the biggest, baddest name in Chicago. Yet somehow, Service Assurance is booming.

Every wedding plays the theme song, but the real life lesson from Dirty Dancing comes from Mr. Kellerman.

Today the customer experience is the center of any meaningful business strategy developed by any communications service provider anywhere in the world. Decisions about technology, systems and processes now are all subordinated to the effort to enable a better customer experience.

Looking to grow its competitiveness in rural markets, Carolina West Wireless needed to implement a next-generation customer management and billing platform.

Harold Teets, C-level exec at tw telecom, credits continued investment during the downturn with financial performance. Next up: true business enablement and end-to-end application management.

Multiple personalities were on display during the Personalization Summit at B/OSS Live!.

It’s no wonder that one whole track at B/OSS Live! explored how service providers can best measure and maintain a quality experience at all levels: network performance, customer care and fulfillment, to name a few.

Given their corporate provenance, it would seem that Sprint and Nsight couldn't be more different. But are they?

Amdocs knows that policy and control technologies are the future and positions itself well with the acquisition of Bridgewater.

Social media has the potential to be a nightmare for service providers since more than 80 percent of those Tweets are critical or reflect a negative customer experience.

Having to cede the primary customer relationship to over-the-top content providers, applications providers and device manufacturers is entirely a possibility for operators going forward.

Fact-based. Intelligent interpretation. An empirical approach. Those are the data points where your business and ours intersect.

It is not good enough today for a company to claim it provides the best service. Companies have to prove it.

DSET Corp. has enhanced its ezNumberPort platform with the addition of the Simplified Provisioning Platform solution.

TOA Technologieshas closed $17.2 million of funding to continue worldwide growth, with an emphasis on sales, marketing and other strategic initiatives.

TEOCO's CEO and founder, Atul Jain, was recently named one of telecom software's 25 most influential people by Billing & OSS World.

Based on the benefits they provided through 2010, this year's B/OSS Excellence Awards winners and candidates moved the industry forward and lived up to the ideals of the back office.

Decision-making in BSS/OSS transformation is not a simple topic, but that's exactly what Michael Irizarry, executive vice president of engineering and CTO of US Cellular, tackled Wednesday in the opening keynote of B/OSS Live!

Does this stress on comparability and detail mean that the Service Assurance Forum will be tactical, not strategic, in character? No way.

Info Directions' guarantee is designed to help service providers secure faster invoice production and revenue collection, increase operational efficiencies and obtain on-demand scalability.

Aria Systems will power the billing for YouSee's high-speed Internet, phone and cable TV services to the residential market.

In an effort to curtail its own costs, the U.S. Postal Service is requiring mailers to be more proactive in maintaining address quality and providing Move Updates, or risk losing related postage discounts.

MCL Systems has released an enhanced Cadebill Real Time Least Cost Routing solution for telecom companies.

CSPs must undergo an operational transformation in the OSS and BSS systems that make service creation, management and delivery a profitable and differentiating exercise. That's driving mergers like Telcordia/Ericsson and a trend toward convergent charging.

The growth in SA reflects service-provider awareness that service quality will play an increasingly important role in the industry as services become more complex and demand more network resources and abilities.

In this image gallery, B/OSS looks at people whose work has had significant influence on the direction of telecom software.

The cloud computing model is beginning to transform many businesses and some industries. Possibly very soon it will transform the entire business world. But the cloud isn't a new concept. In fact, some BSS/OSS innovators have been built around the concept.

Acting as a protocol mediation solution, WebNMS enables multiple, disparate protocols to seamlessly "speak" to one another while acting as a single repository EMS for billing, service activation, reporting and customer support.

Ganges is a Business Process Management and Workflow software platform.

MATRIXX and Aria announced a new partnership and the industry's first cloud-deployed, real-time rating and billing solution for communications service providers and their enterprise customers.

Nex-Tech Wireless has extended its contract for Info Directions' CostGuard OSS/BSS solution and will add the company's OnlineBill self-care module.

Tata leverages its network service provider heritage and flexible packaging from Zuora to become a global cloud provider.

Clueless parents with conveniently ignorant teenagers grab all the bill-shock headlines, but it is the enterprise for which services providers write off $20 million per month.

Winners in the six categories will be announced June 15 during ceremonies at the B/OSS Live! Conference & Businessplex in Washington, D.C.

Innovation changes lives for the better. Check out our image gallery that highlights the best back-office innovators.

B/OSS is dramatically increasing the amount and depth of premium content we provide and encouraging community involvement in these important topics.

Flamers found social media a great outlet for blasting companies they had a beef with. It is time to turn the tables on them.

Vice President Sandy Wiersma of ENABIL Solutions will explore how billing can be a difference maker for your company – if you master the fundamentals of billing.

Neither snow nor rain nor sleet nor blah … blah … blah … let it go. We have alternatives.

The Internet has shown we may not be quite ready to be our own gatekeepers, but we better learn.

RevX is introducing the RevX Policy Manager, designed to provide policy and service entitlement solutions to enhance dynamic, real-time services.

DigitalRoute will further strengthen its presence in the Americas in response to strong, continuous growth in that region.

BIT has invested in additional state-of-the-art technology within its in-house video studio, which will also enable more streamlined off-site video shoots.

As the world's consumption of communications services is transformed by an unbounded appetite for high bandwidth services, back-office execs face crucial choices in their mission to feed it a healthy diet.

The Cloud is for real, but it is really a long way from being "as advertised."

Partner sessions at B/OSS Live! are designed to allow attendees to obtain a particularly deep understanding of some of the top solutions providers in the industry. The setting is designed to encourage interaction and dialogue.

This photo gallery introduces you to B/OSS’ Best in Leadership honorees, recognized for successfully advancing, leveraging or influencing the business benefits of telecom support software, and moving the industry forward.

Zuora and Salesforce.com fit the bill for cloud apps according to a Canadian 4G wireless provider.

The New Zealand Post will begin offering an alternative to snail mail using software from Zumbox.

Since 2005, OSG has provided PAETEC with service and assistance in maximizing their custom transactional documents and has played an integral role in the migration and integration of some of PAETEC's biggest and most successful acquisitions.

CustomCall Data Systems says it's the first OSS vendor to electronically bond to Puerto Rico Telephone's LSR provisioning system.

The collaboration is designed to enable Convergys to offer communications and cable/broadband providers serving enterprise clients deeper and richer analytics as part of its Smart Revenue Solution.