Operator billing arrives in France, the UK, Germany and the US
Boku, an online mobile payments enabler, has launched direct operator billing with French carriers Bouygues Telecom and SFR, a subsidiary of Vivendi, adding to existing direct billing with Orange France. The partnership offers an additional 32 million French customers the ability to pay for digital goods and services using only their existing wireless service account, with the charge appearing on their carrier bill. The agreement means nearly all mobile users in France will be covered by direct operator billing from Boku.
The French moves are not alone. Earlier this month, Vodafone began rolling out direct operator billing for apps sold through the Android Market, allowing users to charge purchases direct to their phone bill. “Vodafone operator billing extends developers’ reach to the large number of app-buying customers who are unwilling or unable to use credit cards,” a Vodafone statement commented. “In some countries this can be more than 90% of the market.”
The first operations to get operator billing for Android will be Vodafone UK and Vodafone Germany. The operator intends to extend the payment method to its global properties. In the US, T-Mobile announced at the start of the month that it is soon to launch what it calls ‘direct carrier billing’ to enable users to make purchases that will appear on their phone bills. However, the service has attracted the attention of the Consumers Union, which has voiced fears that operator billing leaves customers unprotected from fraud or merchant errors.
“Purchasing … is now even easier with this partnership powering a safe, secure and convenient direct carrier billing option,” said the MovieStarPlanet CEO Claus Lykke Jensen. “User feedback and increased revenue clearly indicate how much people love the convenience of Boku to pay via their mobile number. This new partnership will extend that convenience to many more loyal gamers in France.”
Telekom Malaysia successfully deploys NIS from Clarity
Clarity has successfully completed the deployment of its Network Inventory System (NIS) project for Telekom Malaysia Berhad (TM), Malaysia’s broadband champion and leading integrated information and communications group.
In 2006, TM initiated a major OSS transformation to support the rapid growth of its broadband services, to maintain competitiveness with agile new entrants to the Malaysian market and to enable the rapid and accurate deployment of new services to its customers. As a result, Clarity’s unified OSS continues to be deployed in phases to support these goals. The completion of the NIS marks an important milestone and provides TM with a network-wide view of its assets and inventory data across one system.
Clarity’s unified OSS solution already manages the company’s logical and physical network infrastructure. This has centralised TM’s engineering workflow processes and provisioning for IP, telephony, broadband and narrowband services, allowing the CSP to plan for and monitor maintenance activities and outages and to ensure end-to-end integrated workflow between order management and inventory.
To date, Clarity’s OSS has replaced over 12 legacy inventory databases that were migrated in 36 months and currently interfaces with over 22 customer management and provisioning systems. Exposing the single NIS into the strategic service-oriented architecture will further reduce the cost and lead-time for integration of new systems and the time-to-market for new services.
Armando Almeida, head of Global Services for Nokia Siemens Networks
Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) has begun operations at its Global Network Operations Centre (GNOC) located in Voronezh, Russia. The new operation has been designed to aid telcos across the country and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) to improve the speed, quality and efficiency of their services. At the same time NSN also revealed that Mobile TeleSystems (MTS) in Russia would be the first operator to enjoy the benefits of the centralised network operations for regional operators.
The centre, built with the capacity to expand up to 3,000 square meters, is able to host up to 500 expert technicians and is being expanded to manage up to 100,000 network elements in Russia. NSN said that this would include the GNOC’s areas of expertise and resources growing to include network planning and optimisation services.
The new facility, designed to operate multi-vendor networks, joins an existing network of four other multi-technology, multi-vendor GNOCs – two in India, one in Portugal and one in Brazil. These are interconnected to allow for optimal allocation of resources and have a remote delivery model, which applies standardised and automated IT tools and processes. According to NSN, the network of GNOCs remotely handles close to 180m network alarms, generating over 185,000 performance reports every month.
Armando Almeida, head of Global Services for Nokia Siemens Networks, explained how operators around the world were seeing the benefits of outsourcing network operations in a trend that was gaining momentum.
“Our GNOC in Russia is our fifth globally and will help operators in the country and CIS to outsource their daily network operations and maintenance tasks,” he added. “This will allow them to focus on their core business activities such as improving service quality and increasing business profitability.”
TIBCO Software has announced that it has acquired Nimbus Partners, a privately-held, UK-headquartered provider of business process discovery and analysis applications.
The deal will see Nimbus providing a strong complement to TIBCO’s event-enabled infrastructure software platform. Whereas TIBCO has traditionally focused on the automation of data, systems, and processes, Nimbus allows business users to collaboratively describe and document all aspects of a business – from operational best practices to organisational and system models. These are combined with robust governance capabilities that can deliver a process-focused “Intelligent Operations Manual” across the enterprise, linked to supporting data and systems.
Nimbus focuses on the vast majority of processes that are often not captured in enterprise applications and automated workflows, and it has found particular traction with business transformation, compliance-led, and continuous improvement initiatives.
Ian Gotts, Founder and CEO, Nimbus Partners, said: “By combining Nimbus with TIBCO and its market-leading capabilities and global reach, we will expand the range of audiences we can serve and depth of processes we can address while together providing insight that enables employees to make better decisions.”
Tekelec has integrated its session, policy, performance and subscriber data management products into new solutions for LTE. The company previously announced a win with an un-named tier-one North American operator that saw integration of Tekelec’s Home Subscriber Server (HSS) address resolution database with its Diameter Signaling Router (DSR). This allows the service provider to scale LTE services by routing Diameter messages to the appropriate HSS in the network.
In addition to those two products, Tekelec’s LTE portfolio includes:Policy Server a Policy and Charging Rules Function (PCRF) that integrates with the HSS and acts as the brain for policy coordination, dynamic bandwidth control, charging, consumption and other factors for a subscriber’s entire data session; and Performance Intelligence Center (PIC), a performance management system that converts network traffic information into useful business intelligence for service providers to improve the customer experience. The PIC integrates with the DSR to eliminate the need for additional probes and network elements to analyse how subscribers are using IP-enabled devices and applications. In addition, Tekelec has added the PIC troubleshooting features to the core DSR platform to continuously monitor the DSR’s performance.
“LTE network build-outs present new challenges that require innovative solutions as operators add subscribers and network capacity to meet the exponential demand for mobile broadband services,” said Joe McGarvey, principal analyst at research firm Current Analysis. “Tekelec’s strategy is to replicate its 2G and 3G network successes in LTE by simplifying and streamlining complex network architectures to enable network scalability, flexibility and reliability.”
Qosmos closes €19.8m in funding with DFJ Esprit, FSI and Alven Capital
Qosmos, a provider of Network Intelligence (NI) technology, has revealed the closing of a €19.8m financing deal with DFJ Esprit, Fonds Stratégique d’Investissements (FSI) and Alven Capital. The deal is a combination of primary equity and debt plus a secondary purchase of former investor Sofinnova’s stake in the company by the three named companies.
The investment will support Qosmos’ expansion in the North America and Asia-Pacific regions, fuel its product development and global marketing efforts, as well as fund potential acquisitions. Profitable since 2009, Qosmos revenues increased 40% in 2010. The company pioneered NI technology based on next-generation Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) and its ixEngine product delivers visibility into data crossing wireless networks by identifying, extracting and querying specific information with unparalleled precision and detail.
Momentum for the firm is at an all-time high, with the company enjoying double-digit revenue growth for the last six years, earning numerous awards from leading business and technical organisations and establishing two new industry organisations in the last year—the Network Intelligence Alliance and the Qosmos Expert Developer Network.
Thibaut Bechetoille, president and CEO of Qosmos, said, “This investment is the result of the momentum the company has seen building over the last several years, and is tremendous validation of our horizontal component technology strategy, OEM business model and vision to become the leading independent “pure play” vendor of Network Intelligence technology.”
African customer extends DSA order with Evolving Systems
Evolving Systems, a leading provider of software solutions and services to the wireless, wireline and IP carrier market, has revealed that an African customer has placed a significant upgrade order for the company’s Dynamic SIM Allocation (DSA) solution, providing support for mobile broadband and number selection.
The initial phase of the DSA solution, allowed the operator to overcome many of the issues associated with pre-provisioning such as number utilisation, network capacity and regulatory constraints. Phase number two will extend the use of the solution to support number selection, allowing the operators’ prepaid subscribers a choice when selecting their phone number. Considered a key differentiator, this will enhance the user experience and provide the operator with an opportunity to generate revenue through the sale of vanity numbers. Subscribers will also be able to select a preferred language from the menu options.
Thad Dupper, chairman and CEO, Evolving Systems, said: “This carrier’s decision to upgrade their DSA implementation with the addition of our successful number selection and mobile broadband features, will enable them to offer a wider range of personalisation at time of activation.”
Openet has announced the availability of a major new version of its award-winning PCRF software. Openet Policy Manager 4.0, featuring an incorporated Decision Core, simplifies the creation of even the most complex rules to manage network resources and create next generation service offerings.
With a powerful logic configuration capability and tight integration with Openet’s existing charging suite of products, Policy Manager 4.0 enables operators to continue evolving revenue models while serving subscriber demand for bandwidth. Flagship features of the new version include an enhanced rules engine that enables operators to more easily monetise and manage service-driven data growth, improved configuration interfaces and an enhanced Rx interface extending application support, including 4G IMS.
Mike Manzo, CMO, Openet, said: “Business needs can change on a dime, and all systems need to be able to support new business models with a quick turnaround time and minimal effort. Openet Policy Manager, long recognised as the best in the market, is ready to help operators grow in the face of new competitive challenges and new technologies.”
Device Intelligence System from Mobilethink Analytics helps raise the bar for CSPs
A new service from Mobilethink Analytics is helping to raise the bar in device intelligence, enabling marketing departments to improve ARPU and customer retention rates at a fraction of the price of a full-blown business intelligence system.
With a processing tool now giving users access to a device database, enabling them to identify every feature of 6,500 phones and connect cards, the firm says that it’s possibly the most powerful and extensive database of mobile phone capabilities in the industry. Users are even given the option of integrating reporting output with other campaign tools such as special deals for targeted mobile user groups.
Lars Vestergaard, managing director, Mobilethink Analytics, said: “We believe this next generation analytics offering is destined to become a fundamental part of a network or virtual network operators’ business. For years, marketing departments and analysts have demanded real world business-critical intelligence about customers’ phones in their networks to better up-sell new services and improve customer retention rates. With Mobilethink Analytics’ new offering, they can.”
OpenCloud welcomes technology veteran Geoff Unwin as its new chairman
Geoff Unwin
Following capital annual growth (CAGR) in excess of 100 percent during the past three years, OpenCloud has announced the appointment of Geoff Unwin as Chairman. As a long-standing technology executive with a background steeped in IT services Unwin will provide strategic guidance to sustain the company’s impressive growth.
He began his career in the late 1960s when he joined Hoskyns Group PLC, becoming an influential figure there before reaching the post of Managing Director in 1984. There, Unwin oversaw the group’s flotation in 1986 and its following acquisition by Cap Gemini in 1988 as Executive Chairman.Unwin held the position of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) at Cap Gemini E&Y until 2002, leading the successful acquisition of Ernst & Young’s consulting activities during his time there.
Unwin said that he had always been excited by software companies producing disruptive technology and systems that were more open, flexible and cost-effective than those they replaced.
“Telcos worldwide are facing some tough challenges in terms of innovation of services and charging models and OpenCloud has a product suite that is capable of addressing those issues,” he added.
Huawei appoints Culmer as VP of Enterprise business for UK & Ireland
Huawei has announced the appointment of Simon Culmer as its new VP of Enterprise in the UK and Ireland with responsibility for sales and marketing of the UK enterprise business, including setting up Huawei’s local distribution channel.
Culver brings 27 years industry experience to the role, including 12 years at Sun Microsystems and 11 years at Cisco systems. Huawei believes his expertise and experience will help the company to establish the enterprise business as one of the main forces driving revenue growth in the future.
On his appointment, Culmer said: ‘‘I look forward to building and leading a team of industry and partner experts to ensure that Huawei rapidly becomes a significant contributor to the enterprise market. We will be delivering an unmatched and incredibly broad set of solutions including routing and switching, IP telephony, call centre technology, video telephony, telepresence solutions, servers and storage, tablets and smart phones plus many more innovative solutions.”
MATRIXX Software has appointed Jean Delesques, founder and president of French IT consultancy Deljcom, to the role of Corporate Advisor.
Delesques brings more than 25 years of experience in design and implementation of BSS and OSS systems for Communications Service Providers (CSPs) in Europe including France Telecom, Mobistar and Bouygues Telecom. His extensive background working with Europe’s leading CSPs will be pivotal in the corporate evolution of MATRIXX Software in the region.
Dave Labuda, founder and CEO, MATRIXX Software, said: “Jean is a renowned expert having designed systems for SFR, France Telecom, Mobistar and Vodafone Group among others, and we’re fortunate to have his deep knowledge and expertise here at MATRIXX Software. His talent for implementing real-time charging projects in particular will be invaluable to our growth as an organization in Europe.”
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Ericsson has joined forces with four of the biggest names in global technology to call on Europe’s policymakers to take urgent action in five key areas to ensure the region
Cybeats Technologies has announced a software as a service (SaaS) agreement for its SBOM Studio product with one of the largest European telecom providers, that has a $30 billion market cap.
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