Come Together

Mediation Makes Connections for Revenue Assurance, Time-to-Market

“Service bundling is greatly aided by mediation,” says George Jimenez, CEO for mediation vendor ACE*COMM Corp. “You’re looking at being able to impress upon a customer a bill. You have to collect information from disparate networks — wireless, maybe the Internet. You have to put it in the right form, deliver it to the billing system and get it back to a customer. If mediation provides any measurable problem in terms of reliability, the carrier loses money, so it has got to be one of the most reliable links in the chain. Mediation can provide this layer of abstraction into which all these services are fed.”

Most mediation vendors do call detail record conversion required to bill for TDM-based voice services, says Jonjie Sena, director of product management for mediation at ACE*COMM. But new services that require the collection of data from multiple networks or network elements are more of a challenge to mediate. A single session or call might require five data sources and multiple media types. That requires a lot of processes to capture and correlate data from the media stream, the signaling stream, session records and the like, says Sena, so the service provider can attribute usage to individual users, and do cost allocation and revenue assurance.

For example, a large service provider in Europe created a service creation platform to deliver multimedia conference call services, says Sena. A single session on the service typically involves multiple end users, and voice and data streams. The service provider couldn’t use its existing systems and procedures to handle the service because that would only have provided the number of bytes on the call, but no way to tie that information back to the users, Sena says. So ACE*COMM put mediation in place for multiple sources of data involved in the service; those data sources included an OSS, routers, an application server and a SIP proxy server.

The mediation system correlates data between those sources to enable the service provider to know who the users are, their individual usage and other details. Using its mediation system to correlate service information has helped some of ACE*COMM’s service provider customers to improve their revenue by up to $1 million a month, says Jimenez.

Provisioning Agents

Bryan Rank, product manager at Intec Telecom Systems, says that mediation systems are becoming a lot smarter to meet today’s service provider requirements. According to Rank, mediation systems continue to be the go-between from network elements to the back office, but they are now also being called on to be provisioning agents of sorts. That means not just pushing information to the back office, he says, but also being selective about what information is delivered to what back office system. “I call it provisioning because the network needs to understand that it has to deliver new kinds of content,” he says.

Rank likens the role of mediation systems to the role of solutions from such companies as Tibco or Vitria, which provide middleware that ties together various operational and business support systems so those systems don’t have to connect on a one-to-one basis. “When you engineer a new revenue model into the network, it affects everything,” says Rank. “So mediation has to do with time frames to market and the time frame between when the network is geared to deliver something and when it will. If I want to subscribe to push-to-talk service, the network has to understand what push-to-talk is. Mediation needs to deliver the right message to the right business system to allow that thing to happen.”

And Intec offers service providers a toolkit with APIs to enable service providers to do some of their mediation work, such as adding new data types, new feeds and new logic as new applications require, adds Rank.

Flexibility

Cerillion Technologies recently moved into the mediation space to give service providers the flexibility to quickly bring new services and packages to the market, says Robin Burton, head of marketing at the billing and CRM company. Burton says the company thinks existing mediation companies weren’t addressing the service provider need to make changes to services and pricing quickly.

Cerillion is offering service providers three options addressing mediation. It sells a toolkit that the service provider can use to design collectors that interface with various network elements. The vendor also offers service providers a selection of collectors and agents it has already designed and then the service providers can use rules-based agents to address any variants. Or, Cerillion can design the entire mediation system and network element interfaces for service providers and make sure it all works well together.

“The point is that this approach gives service providers more freedom so the service provider doesn’t have to come back to us every time they need to add a new network element to their network,” adds Burton.

Burton says Cerillion implemented the world’s first UMTS billing system for 02 on the Isle of Man.“When we started the contract with 02, they didn’t know what services they’d be running,” Burton says, so they needed a mediation system that was flexible.

“Really with the rules-based engine approach and the freedom that gives the operator, we don’t have to think about the particular services or the particular network elements the service needs to support,” says Stan Hoben, Cerillion’s technical architect for mediation.

Indeed. The idea of the service provider that can bring services to market quickly and change course if the winds of change require it seems to have taken hold.

“Telecom is almost becoming like a fashion goods industry,” TeleManagement Forum President Jim Warner said in the October issue of xchange (page 16). “You don’t have the luxury of rolling out something and having a five-year market test. You just need to put something out there to see if it takes, and you need to be able to have systems that scale and support it. And if it doesn’t work, you need to be able to turn it off.”

Curt Champion, senior director at Convergys, a billing, customer care and employee care software vendor that also sells mediation tools, agrees. To give service providers the ability to take services and equipment on and off the network rapidly, Convergys makes “those connection points configurable and not programmed,” Champion says.

On the mediation front, he adds, there’s a need to understand and create linkages about various transactions on the network; and to have a single mediation solution to handle that and look at transactions end-to-end.

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