Support Systems: Billing Vendors Lower SP Cost of Ownership

In one of the more notable partnerships announced at the show, Microsoft Corp. and convergent billing vendor Portal Software Inc. discussed their new strategic alliance. They say the alliance is based on a common vision of how Web services will help service providers roll out new services at a lower cost.

“This is Microsoft’s first strategic telecom billing relationship,” says Clinton Dickey, business development manager for network service providers at Microsoft. “We’ll lead with Portal when we see a service provider need for billing.” He adds this is just phase one of Microsoft’s relationship with Portal.

Web services promise a revolutionary ability to differentiate communications services through virtually limitless combinations and recombinations of information and software logic, thanks primarily to two Web standards. The first standard, XML, allows for common tagging and formatting of data. This eases the exchange of data, such as a customer profile or product description, from one operation to another. The second standard, the simple object access protocol (SOAP), allows applications to share logic, or “executables,” such as a command to access content through a media server, open a conferencing bridge, activate a router or firewall port, send an instant message or ring an IP phone.

While Web services based on .NET and the Sun Microsystems-led J2E effort have been embraced by some industries, such as financial services and health care, telecom surprisingly has been late to join the game, although some carriers like Qwest Communications International Inc. already have embraced Web services (in this case the Microsoft .NET version).

“We want to translate [interest in] Web services into a groundswell,” says Vijay Iyer, vice president of global alliances for Portal. Iyer notes every application in the data center has to talk to a billing system. “It costs more than 50 percent less to link these types of processes by using Web services than without the technology.”

Portal and Microsoft later this year plan to introduce a billing and customer care solution called BillingAgility that combines Portal’s billing software and the Microsoft .Net platform. BillingAgility is built on Microsoft Windows Server 2003 (64-bit) with the SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition (64-bit). Service providers utilizing a 64-bit architecture and BillingAgility will be able to support more than 25 million subscribers and achieve faster rating and billing runs, according to the companies. The .NET product family also includes additional integration and service creation tools, such as Visual Studio.NET and XML-enabled servers, adds Dickey, who says the full product set is what differentiates Microsoft’s Web services strategy from the competition.

Microsoft and Portal note service providers are working to offer customers new services and features, such as multimedia messaging, IP-based telephony and new devices that offer greater interaction with the Internet, but they often are hindered by the functionality of the network elements that make up their existing operation and business support systems. By using BillingAgility, the companies say, carriers can offer new services fast and at a lower cost than legacy BSSs/OSSs would allow. For example, the seamless connection of data from a CRM or general ledger system to BillingAgility will require less than half the previous programming effort, according to the companies.

Another big supporter of the .NET/Web services movement is Info Directions, which sells CostGuard.NET for local, long-distance and wireless services. The product includes billing, rating, CRM and workflow with a built-in task editor (for provisioning and third-party order and fulfillment tracking).

At the show, Info Directions announced Intelecom Solutions is a new CostGuard.NET client. Intelecom sells local, long-distance, 800, Internet and other services, as well as telecom equipment, to business customers in the New York City area.

Derrick Van Grol, vice president of sales and marketing at Info Directions, says his company moved to the .NET platform more than 18 months ago after realizing it would allow Info Directions to securely communicate with other solutions and offer better ease of use. “Many vendors have workflow tools that require the customer to adopt a new method, but our infoscript lets users extend business objects,” he says. “We’re not going to make you live by our rules.”

Jim Culbert, CTO at MetraTech, says “Web services are starting to find themselves into everybody’s vocabulary.” The company, an early backer of Microsoft’s .NET initiative, announced at Billing World that Who’s Calling Inc. has deployed its solution to automate critical processes, identify revenue leakage and improve data integrity. Because the MetraTech solutions are based on Web services, the company easily can model its offerings to suit the service provider’s view of the customer. For example, Who’s Calling has a unique business in that it sells toll-free numbers to businesses such as car dealerships and can provide those businesses with information on where callers live and their demographics.

In other MetraTech news, the company has allied to pre-integrate its solution with that of BillSoft Inc., a six-year-old company that sells taxation software on an ASP and license basis to telcos and cable companies.

Among the vendors in the J2E Web services camp is Am-beo with its flagship product Rate- Rec, which handles rating, roaming and revenue settlement. The company, in which Intel Corp. has invested $12.5 million, moved from C code to J2E about a year ago, says CEO John Brady.

Among Am-beo’s new customers is a Seattle, Wash., service provider that is overlaying its CDMA network with GSM and wants to add new services.

Brady says this carrier uses Amdocs for billing now, but is enhancing that solution with Am-beo’s tools to support all new services instead of buying various product modules from Amdocs to support the new services. “Operators don’t want to replace billing,” says Brady. “We can enhance it.”

Am-beo now sells its software on a licenseonly basis, but J2E will enable the vendor to move to an ASP model over time, Brady adds. “J2E allows us to have one set of software for multiple databases,” he says, which will allow the company to serve several companies over a single infrastructure.

Peter Lambert, spokesman for the OSS through Java Initiative (OSS/J), says half a dozen OSS/J integration APIs are complete and freely available for download and implementation and that more than 15,000 downloads have already taken place. Among the early adopters of the technology, he says, is Deutsche Telekom’s T-Systems IT unit deployment of the OSS/J Service Activation API for IP services.

T-Systems is working with German OSS company IP VALUE GmbH on commercial implementation of SIP provisioning for turn up of services, QoS and billing, says Lambert. When a SIP service is introduced, explains Lambert, all OSSs need to recognize the new service and related technologies. T-Systems could’ve asked all of its OSS vendors to write extensions to APIs for the new services, he says, but that would have created a new spider web of complexity. Instead, T-Systems and IP Value created a bus with J2E as the underlying technology. This is a case study others in the industry could adopt, he says, adding that the financial services, automotive and health care industries already have embraced J2E, which gives them integration services for all business processes.

Although .NET and J2E didn’t figure into its message, major billing vendor Convergys was also at Billing World telling its story of ease of integration and the ability to quickly add new services.

Convergys at the show unveiled its Infinys solution, which integrates the company’s Geneva rating and billing engine and its Cygent order management capability. But rather than offering the solutions only on an end-to-end basis as the company has done in the past, Infinys is available as a component-based system so service providers can buy it as a complete or a point solution, explains Curt Champion, senior director of product and industry marketing for cable and broadband at the company.

Infinys, which was developed primarily in C and C++, handles the full customer lifecycle management and includes billing and rating; order management; provisioning; mediation; and, through partnerships, network management. Partners on this include inventory and provisioning vendors Cramer Systems, Granite Systems and Syndesis. The initial version of Infinys is targeted at the wireline market and is expected to go into betas this month, with general availability slated for October.

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