As Incumbents face cost, complexity and other challenges in bringing legacy billing systems up-to-speed for use in the new communications age, outsourcing of these systems to third-parties operating in the 'cloud' is emerging as a viable option for cash-strapped and time-poor providers seeking a quick fix.
As Incumbents face cost, complexity and other challenges in bringing legacy billing systems up-to-speed for use in the new communications age, outsourcing of these systems to third-parties operating in the 'cloud' is emerging as a viable option for cash-strapped and time-poor providers seeking a quick fix.
Most recently, VoIP/video calling firm fring has inked a deal with Comarch in which the latter firm is offering cloud-based billing services to support fring's new fringOut service, which enables low-cost calls to landlines and mobiles over its network. Billing counts in VoIP. Comarch provides real-time billing support across the product process, with payment solutions including those from PayPal and G2S.
Krzysztof Kwiatkowski, BSS product manager at Comarch, explained that the system needed to deliver a geographically distributed service capable of scaling to different devices, different vendors and different operating systems. Like many in the cloud-based billing sector, he says his systems can be assembled with "very short implementation time" and at much lower cost than developing in-house converged B/OSS systems. Comarch has other deals in the pipeline, he says.
This, however, is no one horse race. Convergys director Tony Jackson thinks operators "must look beyond internal resolutions and recognise the potential of a hosted billing solution." He told Vanilla Plus he has seen his hosted billing solutions reduce time to market for new systems from as many as 270 days to as few as four days. Bill accuracy and bill processing time also benefit, he says.
Amdocs' director of product marketing, Revenue Management Products & Solutions, Rafi Kretchmer notes that "A unified single BSS solution is the path for delivering the multi facets of convergence."
Gordon Rawling, director of EMEA Marketing, Oracle Communications, also sees unified billing as the direction the market is heading in. "As a result of implementing a unified billing system, CSPs will be able to radically improve their time to market for the delivery of new services and products, lower operational costs and improve their levels of customer service," he said.
This activity follows the TM Forum's January publication of the new “Enterprise-Grade External Compute IaaS Requirements” document. This set of best practice tools for cloud-based B/OSS system delivery will be the go to book to drive better standardisation across available systems.
The complexity and business challenges inherent in developing in-house billing systems seemingly suggests outsourced cloud-based solutions may now be serious contenders but a leap of faith still remains to be made.
