We’re helping a customer leave CloudSense. Here’s why that's a GREAT idea.

When’s the last time one of your vendors said to you, “Sure, I’ll help you migrate off our platform and onto another?”

Never, right?

That’s because telecom vendors have a playbook when you want to leave: stall, obstruct, and sabotage. Things like… dragging their feet on data exports. “Forgetting” to share critical documentation. Refusing to collaborate with your new vendor. And secretly crossing their fingers your migration project crashes and burns so you’ll have no choice but to renew for another term. You know what I mean.

But at CloudSense, a company I acquired in November of 2024, we’re doing something different. When we discovered one of our customers, a Tier-1 telco in the UK, has been trying for over two years to migrate off our platform, we didn’t try to stop them. Instead, we told them we’d HELP THEM LEAVE.

Are you nuts?

Post acquisition, I discovered this telco was stuck on CloudSense. Their internal teams had exhausted themselves. They’d cycled through multiple consulting firms. And they still weren’t off the platform.

So I proposed something radical: we’d migrate them to their new system using Totogi’s
revolutionary product, BSS Magic. Not with vague promises or half-measures, but with a concrete plan to make their exit successful. We’d be able to do it in a matter of months, and I predict that they’d be so impressed with BSS Magic, that the revenue from this customer will exceed our CloudSense licensing by 50% when we’re done.

They immediately said yes.

Why are migrations so difficult?

If you’ve ever been involved in a BSS migration, you know it’s one of the riskiest parts of a BSS implementation. These projects take years to do and usually cost millions in professional services fees. And most times the projects aren’t successful. Our industry is littered with the corpses of failed migration attempts.

Why are these projects so difficult? It’s not just about replacing one system with another. What makes these migrations truly complex is that you’re extracting a cog from an enormous, interconnected machine—and then trying to insert a completely different cog that must mesh perfectly with everything around it.

Each BSS component in your stack isn’t a standalone entity—it’s integrated with dozens and dozens of other systems through countless touchpoints. When you replace CloudSense (or any BSS component), you’re not just moving data. You’re disrupting a delicate ecosystem that’s evolved over years or even decades.

The real challenge is maintaining the integrity of these connections. It’s about ensuring that when you rip out one system and plug in another, all the surrounding systems—billing, provisioning, customer care, sales, reporting—continue functioning without disruption. One misaligned integration point can cause cascading failures across your entire business operations.

Consider the complexity: A typical Tier-1 operator like the one we’re working with has a BSS estate with 20-30 major systems, hundreds of integration points, and thousands of interdependencies. Replacing just one component requires reconfiguring connections with dozens of other systems—each with its own data model, semantical data interpretation, API conventions, and technical quirks. Traditionally these projects are done 100% with human teams—mapping the entire ecosystem, planning, and executing the project. While code is written to accelerate the transformation, it’s largely a custom, manual effort.

It’s no wonder this Tier-1 telco had been struggling for years. You’ve likely experienced similar challenges with your own transformation initiatives—endless head-scratching, late nights, and expensive consultants engaged in trial-and-error mapping exercises, all while trying to keep the rest of your BSS ecosystem functioning normally.

BSS Magic (and AI!) to the rescue

What makes our approach different is BSS Magic—an intelligent layer that works across your entire BSS estate by combining advanced AI with our proprietary telco-specific ontology. Aligned to TM Forum standards, this ontology acts as a universal translator that truly understands telecom data structures, not just connects them.

Unlike solutions that merely add AI to individual systems (creating more silos), BSS Magic actually understands all your systems, abstracting legacy application APIs and data models via open standardized TMF-compliant interfaces.

When we connect the customer’s CloudSense instance, the target system, and all other other interfacing systems around the CloudSense instance to BSS Magic, the AI will take over and in hours create the plan, code, and tasks to do the migration.

Here’s an example set of tasks the AI will do for our human teams:

• Discover complex data relationships in minutes, instead of months
• Automatically generate data mapping rules by understanding semantic equivalences across systems
• Write new integration code for the new target system
• Detect integration errors before they cascade through your ecosystem
• Write and execute test cases to make sure the migration is successful

When we connect BSS Magic to any system—not just CloudSense—it automatically maps everything to a common data model based on open standards like TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture (ODA) and APIs. This means your data isn’t just migrated; it’s transformed into a format that will make future migrations or integrations dramatically easier.

Interoperability, realized

This approach isn’t just about helping one customer leave. It’s about fulfilling the original vision of TM Forum’s ODA that has remained elusive for over a decade.

Since 2012, the industry has worked toward a modular, cloud-native architecture that would increase agility, simplify operations, lower costs, and accelerate innovation. Over the years TM Forum has created 1,400 Open APIs, downloaded over 1 million times by 53,000+ developers. Over 178 companies have signed the Open API Manifesto. It has wide industry support from some of the world’s biggest telcos and vendors.

Yet despite these impressive numbers, the vision that industry leaders like Laurent Leboucher of Orange described—“truly interoperable, modular, innovative, and cloud-native solutions”—has remained out of reach. While the ODA is a great idea in theory, in practice it’s been impossible to realize given the underlying problem of different vendor data models and embedded semantic meaning in stored data.

Until now. The recent availability and rapid advancement of generative AI have finally provided the missing piece.

With BSS Magic, that dream is becoming reality.

Putting our money where our mouth is

We’re so confident in BSS Magic that we see this project not as losing a customer but as an opportunity to demonstrate what this technology can do—both for this telco and for the entire industry.

Here’s why this approach makes strategic business sense for us:

First, by helping this telco migrate successfully, we’re showcasing BSS Magic’s capabilities in the most challenging possible scenario. There’s no better proof point than solving a real problem that’s stumped everyone else for two years.

Second, we’re positioning BSS Magic as an essential tool for this telco’s entire digital transformation journey. We’re betting that once the operator experiences the successful migration, the team will want to use it EVERYWHERE—for ongoing transformations, changes, customizations, and data analysis across their estate.

But the implications go far beyond one customer. This impacts the entire industry. ​​What we’re demonstrating here is exactly what the forefathers of TM Forum dreamed of: a world where BSS components can be swapped in and out without massive disruption, where telcos aren’t locked into vendor relationships simply because the cost of leaving is too high.

Imagine selecting best-of-breed solutions based solely on their merits—not their compatibility with your existing stack. Imagine replacing underperforming vendors without triggering multi-year, multi-million-dollar migration projects. Imagine true interoperability where AI handles the complexity of data transformation behind the scenes.

This fundamentally changes the power dynamic between telcos and their technology vendors. It creates a reality where innovation and performance—not contractual lock-in—determine success. When we demonstrate that we can help customers accomplish transformations at record pace, we’ll attract many more telcos dying to innovate and update their BSS estate.

Ready to experience true interoperability?

Want to see BSS Magic transform your most challenging migration or integration project? Come see us at DTW Ignite in June where we’ll share the remarkable results of this project and others and demonstrate how AI is finally making the dream of true interoperability a reality.

Can’t wait that long and have a BSS problem that needs solving? Give me a call and we can get started today.

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