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More than ten years later, Comverse has taken Sahin’s vision and fleshed it out into a robust billing platform that will bill for any combination of products a CSP can offer and accept any form of payment a CSP is willing to accept. (You could say any form of payment a customer would choose, but one suspects those customers who might want to pay with baseball cards or Billy Beer would not be accommodated). What Comverse is doing fundamentally is playing into CSP’s core business drivers.

Cost, Consolidation, and Capability
“It’s almost as simple as two things: new business models and the need to drive cost out,” says Alice Bartram, AVP, Marketing Billing & Active Customer Management for Comverse. “We see a lot of operators coming and saying on the one hand ‘my systems can’t deal with content services and I can’t even deal with bundles today,” she says. She adds that given how rapidly services are proliferating, and how much the complexity they entail is escalating, it’s obvious that the traditional billing platforms aren’t keeping up. “If you want content-based charging, or QoS based services for example, you need new capabilities.”

The other factor – cost – is exacerbated both by the number of aging billing platforms still in production and the lingering cost and pain associated with unfulfilled, best of breed efforts. “If you have multiple billing systems, getting those down to one, or significantly fewer, well the ROI or payback on those kinds of projects is pretty clear,” Bartram says. She backs it up with the example of ECI in Alaska which realized a 65 percent return on a billing consolidation that resulted in ROI realized within 18 months. As a result of that consolidation, she says, ECI also proved to itself that bundle services do, in fact, drive customer loyalty while making CSR training much easier and cheaper because everyone learns just one system.

than 250 primary offerings down to roughly one dozen, which resulted in massive efficiencies and savings. “We think we’re delivering simplification in terms of fewer moving parts, fewer systems, and fewer integration points. There is, however, a lot of process and business model thought that has to go into this first,” Bartram says.

Real-Time Transactions
Comverse admits that it is still working on expanding its presence in North American operators, most of which work with one or two well known suppliers. But North American operators also aren’t as excited yet about new business models as are players in other parts of the world. “What we see as [CSPs] move to these rich varieties of plans, subscriptions, and service attributes you deal with more information in real-time,” Bartram says.

For example, she says CSPs are concerned with monitoring consumption of 3rd party services in real time to limit their exposure to credit risks and fraud. The billing equation isn’t just post-paid, or pre-paid, but some combination of the two. Comverse One, she says, aims to deal with “lots of different information about the same customer and offer hybrid, sophisticated offerings that combine pre-paid, post-paid, and other formats.” Ultimately there are significant