Australia's NBN Co chief Mike Quigley has announced that IBM will be the prime systems integrator for its business support systems / operational support systems (BSS / OSS) project.

Since most of the A$43 billion project is civil engineering such as trench-digging and cable-laying, the BSS / OSS decision has been keenly watched as one of the largest single IT opportunities in the National Broadband Network.

Having failed to find a suitable off-the-shelf platform, NBN Co had been talking about a custom-built solution since 2010. The company has described the BSS / OSS project as something that has not been done before.

As well as providing internal BSS / OSS capabilities, the NBN Co system will be accessible to the company’s service provider customers, giving them direct access to the platform to provision and manage their end-user customers.

Quigley made the announcement at the CommsDay Summit in Sydney. ®

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