Pipeline Publishing, Volume 5, Issue 12

	This Month's Issue:
	Diving into Service Delivery

The BSS Report:
Comverse on Transformation

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demands put on the billing platform to monitor, collect, and deliver information in real time to various channels, like online customer portals, and processes, like service fulfillment and fraud management.

Personalization Taps into Primal Forces
Personalization is a buzz-word that’s thrown around the industry quite a bit, and usually it relates to up-sales that play on Amazon.com’s “those who bought this, also bought that” model. But the real power of personalization taps into something far more primal. There are two major reasons why services like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have had phenomenal success in attracting users. One is that they give everyone a voice – everyone has power. The other is that they play into our primal need to manipulate our environment.

Anthropologists say that one of the reasons hominids became so successful was that we developed the ability to change environments to suit our needs. The city of Chicago is a testament to this. If not for heated parking garages, no one in their right mind would live on the shore of Lake Michigan in January. The nut that telecom needs to crack – and these Internet players haven’t – is how to monetize that primal instinct. “When we first talked about account control three years ago, there was this hue and cry against control being controlling,” Bartram says. “But customers want to have their own control over their account, to turn things on and off or select a personalized package. Alltel has used our system to allow customers to select tailored pre-paid plans over the web and have had great results,” she says.

Similarly, in regards to enterprise services, Bartram explains that she sees that CSPs also are beginning to understand the benefits of putting control in the customer’s hands. “You think about personalization for SIP-based features. Let employees select certain things online. You can take off a huge administrative burden and give more flexibility to the end user in the process,” she says. Enabling that kind of flexibility means the billing platform needs to be able to get the resulting data from the end user and the network and to the general ledger accurately, reliably, and in real-time. Even if the real-time need isn’t an actual requirement, being able to handle it means any other performance requirement is covered.

Personalization and control capabilities tied to billing and payment transactions are also attractive to players outside of the traditional telecom domain. The entire BSS space is benefiting from demands coming from non-CSPs that have online services that deliver both electronic and hard goods products. “We’ve had customers in the e-business space

Minutes, messages, elephant feed – it didn’t matter.

for more than five years with online auctions and automobile sites,” says Bartram. “They were the early adopters who realized their old systems wouldn’t support their growth…they looked at telco billing as a proven, robust model.”

Scale and Performance
The excitement to support new business models is, of course, balanced against a need for proven scale and performance, especially given the real-time transactional demands. Risk is never removed from the billing equation. “Telstra,” Bartram explains, “chose only to use software that was proven at other operators. That speaks to scale being a concern. You want to make sure the software you look at is proven to support many tens of millions of subscribers, and do it in an efficient way – in a way where your bill cycles are performing.”

Bill cycle performance isn’t as exciting as multi-product support and bundling, unless you’re the CFO or running a care organization. Staying ahead of monthly billing volume is critical to cash flow, and keeping billing accurate and on time is a key factor in maintaining customer satisfaction. “In China,” Bartram explains, “we’re doing one bill cycle for 30 million subscribers. That’s one of our best proof points for getting a bill cycle out in a very efficient manner.”

Taking on the Marketplace
Comverse has now emerged from relative obscurity to take its place among the dominant suppliers in the billing market. As everyone including Comverse continues to chase the biggest of the big dogs, however, the next decade is likely to prove out who’s invested in the right approach. The massive changes in the industry’s business models have a direct impact on what makes for an effective billing platform. Making the wrong bets now will have pain repercussions in the near term, and possibly fatal ones in the long term. Comverse is betting that Comverse One is the right approach for where the industry is rapidly headed. Without question, the momentum it has already gained means the company is no longer an also-ran in the billing market.

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