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Billing as a Service

With Forbes dubbing "Everything as a Service" as one of the mega-trends of 2010, does it really apply to Telecom Billing as well? Well it turns out that the paradigm of "Billing as a service" is here to stay not only in 2010 but beyond, for the business benefits are far too many and way too compelling. As we know, in this model, the cost of buying and licensing the traditional enterprise software are thrown out of the window, and is replaced by a pay-per-subscription or a pay-per-usage model thereby drastically reducing the costs of operation. Billing as a service implies functions like pricing, product management, customer management, rating, billing and invoicing are available on a "pay per usage of service" model.
The case for "Billing as a Service" is much more engaging for Tier-2 and Tier-3 Telecom operators who can kick-off their services without a heavy upfront investment in acquiring on-premise Enterprise Software. The key business benefits include enhanced flexibility and agility in meeting the demands of business, low maintenance costs, quick scalability, faster speed to market. The biggest challenge is in the form of data security and regulatory compliance. Other challenges include vendor lock-in and adherence to QoS SLAs. While embracing the "Billing as a Service" model, the telecom operators would need to transform their business processes as well as define the metering and charge-back models. For example, the call records may not be visible on a real time basis on the customer self-care but in the form of 12-hour feeds. However the customer can see the overall balance on a real-time basis. 

So all in all, "Billing as a Service" presents itself as a promising cost-reduction and efficiency enhancing option for Tier-2 and Tier-3 telecom operators. A few vendors have already taken the lead and brought out comprehensive offerings in the market. Hoping to see the action spicing up in this space in 2010 and beyond!

Posted by Abhishek Singh on February 9, 2010 7:28 AM |

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Comments

Interesting article . Abhishek, would you have the list of vendors offering this billing software as a pay per use service ? Can you pl. share their names ? thanks

jagat jit singh

Commented by: Jagat Jit Singh | March 17, 2010 7:44 AM

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