In today’s hyper-competitive landscape, telecom operators face constant pressure to reduce costs. The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of the required network infrastructure, data centres, dedicated IT teams and licensing models is constantly escalating – an issue that is often compounded by outdated IT architectures. These rigid systems can hinder or prevent operators from swiftly launching new services or adopting new commercial models, leading them to miss opportunities for revenue generation.
Addressing this issue requires investment into digital transformation, which can be demanding amidst pressure to keep OpEx and CapEx as low as possible, but is of course necessary given the escalating costs of maintaining and upgrading ageing, inflexible legacy Business Support System (BSS). Operators are therefore in the position of having to invest in increasing their agility while reducing their TCO it is a strategic imperative to transition to a SaaS-based BSS.
A SaaS BSS can directly address these challenges through its core architectural and commercial principles: it acts as a digital transformation core, replacing legacy monolithic BSS stacks and decoupling front-end experiences from backend complexity. It empowers business teams via no-code tools, improves operational agility, and accelerates monetisation across consumer, enterprise, and B2B2X segments.
Modular, Cloud-Native Design
The cloud-native, microservices-based digital platform resides fully in the BSS layer, connecting to OSS for service activation and assurance. It offers a modular solution that is flexible and highly scalable, allowing Communication Service Providers (CSP) to opt for full-stack deployment to replace their legacy software. CSPs can also approach a step-by-step modernisation wherein they can choose which platform components to add first, then add further solutions as needed. Individual BSS modules can be integrated seamlessly with other customer’s existing modules or systems any time.
A SaaS BSS platform is an innovative multi-tenant architecture, which allows CSPs to onboard and operate multiple brands or business units on a single infrastructure. Each tenant is fully separated in terms of data, logic, and configuration, while benefiting from shared platform scalability and reduced total cost of ownership at the same time. A Headless CMS enables content and experience layers to be decoupled, allowing rapid and dynamic personalisation across web, mobile, and any digital touchpoint. This type of architecture facilitates omnichannel consistency, seamless CX, and real-time marketing agility.
Alignment with Industry Standards
Built in accordance with TM Forum’s ODA standards and principles, a SaaS BSS platform uses Open APIs, meaning that CSPs can easily integrate it with their existing first- or third-party systems to transform into an agile digital operation. Microservices provide CSPs with the necessary speed and agility to introduce or modify product features and capabilities quickly, accelerating time-to-market for new products and services and allowing CSPs to experiment with new business models and service concepts easily.
Empowering Business Users through Low-Code / No-Code
A Low-Code/No-Code Studio, empowers CSPs business users to design, test, and deploy customer journeys, workflows, and commercial offers without coding. The result is faster time-to-market and decreased reliance on IT, enabling continuous adaptation to changing market dynamics.
Embedded AI: Automation and Intelligence Across Every Layer
Artificial Intelligence is natively embedded into a modern SaaS BSS platform across multiple layers as: GenAI-powered virtual agents for humanised self-service and assisted channels; AI-driven upsell/churn prediction engines using customer digital twins; and journey orchestration powered by decision intelligence and predictive analytics. These advanced capabilities allow operators to personalise products and services and automate business processes. By leveraging deep customer insights, campaigns can be tailor to individuals to boost conversion rates, increase revenues and enhance customer lifetime value.
Powered by agentic AI to reduce manual work, lower error rates, and enable predictive, data-driven operations, the SaaS BSS platform’s cloud-native architecture enables cost-effective operation and maintenance while boosting both flexibility and scalability. While Digital BSS can be deployed on-premises, it also offers cloud-compatible implementation which offers better functionality as well as significantly reducing up-front CapEx and enabling fast implementation and cost-effective digital transformation.
A SaaS BSS platform’s scalability means that costs will only increase as and when the business grows and to achieve this at a global scale, a vendor must have partnerships with various public cloud services, as AWS and Microsoft Azure. These types of agreements will help accelerate the transition to all-digital BSS, as well as allowing operators to quickly set up greenfield digital brands which can then be managed on the same platform, streamlining costs and diversifying growth to ensure quick value creation.
Launch Digital Brands Fast with SaaS BSS
The ability to launch new digital brands in a matter of weeks helps operators meet their target segment's needs in a unique and differentiating manner. The rise of MVNOs, brand proliferation, and omnichannel digital experiences have amplified complexity, making it essential to have a multi-tenant SaaS architecture that enables isolated yet efficient tenant management. The SaaS multi-tenancy approach drives resource optimisation and faster provisioning of new brands or markets without heavy infrastructure investment. This approach aligns strategic objectives with business models and technologies to translate customer insights into effective holistic solutions, helping businesses become more unique and adaptive.
Unlike legacy BSS that rely on on-premises deployments with siloed instances per brand resulting in costly duplication and slow innovation, a SaaS BSS solution offers ta multi-tenancy within a single SaaS platform. In this way, the platform enables multiple brands, geographies, or business units to securely operate independently while sharing common infrastructure, dramatically reducing operational complexity and cost.
A cloud-native BSS stacks can be hosted in the public cloud, which offers several advantages. In addition to better scalability, support, and operations, deployment and maintenance are simplified by hosting the stacks in the public cloud. This also provides on-demand resources for simplified capacity planning and enables a shift from capital expenditure to operational costs.
Quantifiable Impact
Operators adopting SaaS BSS consistently report:
- 20% reduction in operating costs compared to on-premises models.
- Service launch times reduced from weeks to hours.
- Up to 70% shorter customer service response times through AI-enabled self-service.
- Churn reduction of up to 35% via hyper-personalised offers.
- Significant OpEx savings from automated, data-driven resource management.
Such improvements go beyond incremental savings and fundamentally reshape how telecoms allocate resources, reinvest in innovation, and achieve sustainable profitability.
Building the Future of Telecom Operations
Etiya has been at the forefront of SaaS BSS innovation, helping telecom operators transition to cost-efficient, agile operations. Its AI-powered Digital BSS integrates automation, analytics, and low-code configuration within a cloud-native, multi-tenant architecture enabling operators to modernise progressively while maintaining business continuity.
Through strong partnerships with AWS, Microsoft Azure, and alignment with TM Forum’s ODA standards, Etiya empowers service providers to unlock measurable efficiency gains and faster returns on digital transformation investments.
For telecom operators aiming to “do more with less,” SaaS BSS is not just a technological upgrade, it’s a strategic foundation for operational excellence.
Contact Etiya for a personalised consultation or a demo on quantifying SaaS BSS ROI.
