Livewire: The Communications, Media and Entertainment Blog

A large number of CSPs still maintain multiple legacy home grown billing systems which were developed earlier based on mainframe technologies with point to point interfaces. These billing systems being outdated have high TCO, longer implementation  & deployment windows and high maintenance and support costs. Also discrete billing systems maintained for different business units for different product lines lead to a fragmented customer view.

 

CSPs can significantly reduce these costs by rationalizing and consolidating their existing legacy billing systems into a single new generation high performance, scalable, flexible and SOA based billing solution from leading COTS product vendors like Oracle, Comverse, Amdocs, Intec etc. These new generation COTS products provide:
§  Quick implementation  on account of comprehensive out of the box functionalities and hence shorter lead time to market
§  3G service offerings
§  Online/ customer self customized  services to end-users
§  Integrated view of customer billing data
§  Agile & flexible Product catalogue features
§  New revenue growth engines
§  Real time rating & charging
§  Convergent billing
§  Enriched bill presentation features
§  On-line payments processing
§  Enhanced customer dispute handling

 

 A rationalized and consolidated next generation billing system will enable service providers to incorporate process improvements, gain market differentiation, enhanced customer  experience, achieve cost savings, generate new growth, gain better ROI on infrastructures, shared services and maintain agile work force who have access to next generation billing solution and cutting edge technologies to work upon. Also by investing and capitalizing on the new generation billing system, service providers can outsource non-core activities of systems maintenance and focus on their core competencies.