What drives CSP's to opt for Managed Billing Services?
Of late, communication service providers are inclined to enter into a managed services deal with IT vendors. According to Gartner's Communications Industry IT report, worldwide spending on IT outsourcing will grow at a 5 percent compounded annual growth rate for the next five years. These large scale outsourcing deals are not only beneficial from a cost saving perspective, but also would help to increase top-line revenue generations.
Managed billing services provide key business benefits such as
• Quick lead time to market - driven by Service level agreements. Ready to use solutions and systems support available
• Reduced Operational cost - Systems developed & maintained by Service bureau providers with no over head running cost for CSPs.
• Shared Risk, Shared Reward - Shared between CSP and managed service hostManaged billing services integrated with existing business processes removes the need to have a dedicated billing development and operations team for the CSPs. CPS's instead of worrying about operational cost and system issues can focus on their core business activities and leave nity-grity of maintaining and running systems to managed service providers.
These days major IT and product vendors are offering managed billing bureau services by hosting billing solutions on shared platform custom build on standard COTs package. Managed services are hosted on bureau service provider premises who own hardware and software. On shared platform, separate billing instances configured and customized for specific requirements of communication service providers can be hosted. Along with billing services, truly integrated e2e CRM and provisioning services can be built.
There is good un-tapped market for IT vendors to provide managed billing bureau services. Need to watch this space in coming months with renewed focus from CSP's to cut down their ever growing operating expenditure and cut throat market competition.
