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A Tale of Two IPT Service Providers (Cont'd)
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What's wrong with today's Billers?
"Low cost, straightforward functionality and scalability" is a description that can hardly be applied to the big players in the Billing OSS market today, (e.g. Amdocs, CSG Systems, Convergys, or even MindCTI, or Portal Software). The multi-million dollar Billing environments are just too rich (in every sense). They were designed in the TDM-switched era of time of day; day of week; distance-sensitive charging. Mandatory features included being able to send out detailed invoices every month and to process paper checks, overdue notices, suspensions of services, credits for wrong numbers, late payment/interest charges, etc.
Traditional Billing systems also have complex routines for enabling a wide variety of invoice layouts, payment management, and collection routines. In a world of on-line accounts, flat rate plans and credit card payments, this elaborate functionality also becomes an unwanted expensive component.
Therefore, it's not surprising that our survey of IP Telephony Service Providers concluded that they had all examined the product offerings available from the Billing OSS Vendors and had rejected them because none of them could deliver what they wanted at the price they were prepared to pay.
Why Vonage and Pipemedia chose build over buy
Telephony-oriented Billing systems just don't fit the IPT SP model well, which looks and feels a lot more like a Retail store. In fact, Mr. Holder said that they deliberately used IT developers with a lot of retail system experience (and zero telco experience) to design, implement, and operate their Billing environment.
Rated a complete success, the Vonage system does not even have the concept of a CDR anywhere in its design. How can this be? In a complete break with the past, the Vonage IT developers decided that call information is just like all of the rest of the information a company needs…it's just data. We must admit we had some difficulty grasping this approach at first. Upon further reflection however, (and shedding some of our own dinosaur scales in the process), it became evident that this basic premise is true. And if all of the data needed to run the company is stored in databases against which queries can be run…it becomes easy to see that when it is necessary to create a record of a specific call, it can be easily constructed by running a query for the appropriate data elements, on demand. Essentially, this IPT SP is cutting out almost the entire step called Mediation, a significant streamlining in the complexity of call processing and switch interfaces.
Telco people like to believe that OSS can be a differentiator for their services. Our belief is that business processes are the differentiator and that systems merely enable those processes to run reliably; processes that can handle the "usual" with great efficiency and speed, processes that handle the "exceptions" gracefully, and processes that enable contact with a human should all else fail. These are the differentiators - when you buy bread from the store you don't care what system gets it onto the shelves or what system is used at the checkout - just as long as the loaf is there and you can pay for it without hassle.
The tools available to IP Service Providers wanting to build their own solutions are efficient and relatively inexpensive. Popular choices include C++, Java and Linux and industry standard databases such as Microsoft SQL and Oracle. Each of our survey respondents said that they believe they achieved exactly what they wanted from their Billing systems, at a fraction of the cost from an OSS Vendor.
What conclusions can be drawn from this?
The radically different business model of today's Service Providers requires a radically different approach to OSS.
There are likely several other "brave new world" ideas (like not creating a CDR for each and every call) that can be borrowed from other industries, and successfully applied to the Service Provider business that will further streamline business processes and OSS complexity.
The cost, complexity, and timescale to 'build your own' are much lower with today's software development tools and database technologies.
Even very large "traditional" Service Providers should be seriously considering dramatically leaner Billing solutions. Inertia will continue to enable a market for the traditional package vendors and Service Bureaus for some time to come, but as IP becomes the dominant network of choice for big and small carriers, incumbents, and new generation players alike, we see acceleration toward streamlined, low complexity, low cost Billing systems. In our view, these systems will increasingly come from the Service Provider IT departments, and vendors of transaction-based systems (like Retail), not other vendors of telephony Billing systems.
LTC International Inc. specializes in helping companies in the Telecommunications industry make more profits. We do that by bringing serious first hand experience to bear to align services and projects with business strategies and ensuring that measurable objectives are established for everyone to meet. We deliver results for Service Providers, Hardware and Software Vendors to Service Providers, and to investors. For more information, or to talk about how the LTC team could help you achieve your business objectives, visit: www.ltcinternational.com.
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