Support Systems: Serving Up Solutions

Tekelec Aims to Bring Better Integrity to CDRs

Paula Bernier
08/01/2003

Tekelec, like many equipment companies, is working to go beyond just offering products. It wants to be a solutions company. In Tekelec’s case, that means using its experience in switching and signaling to help service providers ensure the integrity of call detail records.

Tekelec’s efforts in the past year seem to have put it directly on this path. The company probably is best known for its popular EAGLE intelligent networking node. The EAGLE signal transfer point serves as the basis for Tekelec’s newer offerings like the EAGLE 5 SAS, a multiprotocol signaling platform that hosts a variety of applications including SS7 signal transfer, number portability, signaling gateway, integrated services and data mining. Tekelec last December acquired a business unit from VeriSign that sold a data mining tool. And just two months ago Tekelec completed its transaction with Santera Systems to form a majority owned next-generation switching subsidiary.

Lane Liley, Tekelec’s director of billing applications, says the company, which got its start in test and measurement (a business it later sold), never had played in the OSS/BSS space. However, EAGLE long has included the built-in Sentinel link monitoring system that looks at call records running across SS7 links and can tie that in with quality of service, revenue assurance and now data mining information.

“We’re trying to improve the integrity of data on the switch,” says Liley. “We’re headed toward looking at SS7 switch records to ensure consistency and provide more robust records.”

Today Tekelec offers AMA (automated message account) auditing against SS7 records and offers data mining for billing analysis, says Liley, but Tekelec’s tools don’t fix records if there’s a discrepancy. In the future, he says, Tekelec plans to provide mediation feeds to convert SS7 into AMA records so they can be compared side by side with CDRs. That’s planned for 2004, Liley says.

Liley says checking call detail records against SS7 records improves accuracy and can cut service provider revenue leakage by up to 4 percent.

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