Lejla Pljevljak-Rasidagic is the chief products officer of ZIRA. She has been piloting the company’s development of systems that support communications service providers’ (CSPs) digital transformations. Here she explains ZIRA’s approach to the new business models the market is adoptin.
Adjusting to New Business Models and the Urgency of Digital Transformations
It is still a great challenge in terms of how CSPs are adjusting to new business models. Some of them started digital transformations on time, while others are already running out of time. Digital transformations are necessary to the survival of CSPs, they are no longer just a driver of success. When mentioning digital transformations, we need to think about time. Long delivery cycles are no longer an option, everyone is in a hurry to introduce the benefits of digital transformations.
However, it’s not only delivery cycles or drops that need to be shorter, the request for proposals (RFP) processes need to be changed. Lately, some of our customers are looking more for demonstrations and proof of concept evidence during the RFP selection process, because it gives them a better overview of the vendors’ capabilities.
It is well-established that one of the pivots to generate value out of cutting-edge technologies such as 5G, edge and cloud are ecosystems. CSPs are exploring new opportunities by defining and establishing new ecosystems and, while a work in progress, it’s clear that existing capabilities will need to be augmented. As one of the industry pioneers, ZIRA has been a provider of innovative BSS products and solutions for customer, revenue, order and product management. We are committed to maximising customer value, by continuously evolving our business portfolio.
Innovations in Revenue Management
Over the years we at ZIRA have developed comprehensive systems to address and continually bring innovation in the following key areas: Revenue management, which incorporates wholesale and retail domains and covers wholesale business revenue management, financial settlement, roaming, trading and routing and retail billing. In the area of customer partner management, ZIRA systems enable transformation of traditional customer management solutions for true agility across all lines of business and partner types. ZIRA’s Product Catalog is the next generation platform for product and service catalogues that includes product catalogue capability with full product lifecycle management. It provides CSPs with quick and easy configuration of product and service prices across all sales channels, eliminating human errors, protecting profit margins and maximising the financial performance of all products and services.
ZIRA’s order management system is our comprehensive next-generation order management system with best-in-class customer and service order management. This is driven by product catalogue to modernise business processes and increase customer retention by enabling new, emerging services by efficiently reducing operating costs and time-to-market.
Through the years, we have adjusted our product strategy to address new market challenges and trends. We have unlocked capabilities to support introduction of new emerging services, enabling new business models, such as B2B or B2B2X, introducing partner onboarding capabilities and partner agreement handling. We are also ready to support diverse product offerings and investing in interoperability for new ecosystems.
Flexibility and Adaptability: Supporting Emerging Services and Digital Ecosystems
In addition to improving customer-related BSS solutions for both retail and wholesale lines of business, we are addressing partner-related capabilities with the introduction of our Digital Partner Revenue Management Solution (DPRMS). DPRMS is a suite of products from the ZIRA portfolio that address the challenges of managing both partners and suppliers in digital ecosystems. The solution covers the entire process starting from partner onboarding, product catalogue, deal management, ordering and verification of partner bills up to financial settlement.
ZIRA’s product strategy is based on constant improvements in people, technology and tools, and above all on following market trends and listening to our customers’ needs. The ZIRA product portfolio is built on best of stack principles and is aligned with digital reference architecture guidelines. By utilising disruptive software and technology advancements via DevSecOps-controlled deployments we enable a faster digitalisation process for our telecoms customers.
In order to enable easier integration with third-party solutions, reduced resource utilisation with ability to add new features more quickly, our products’ APIs are aligned with TMF Open APIs, where we aim to achieve TMF Open API Gold Level certification. To summarise, we have the flexibility to adapt to the new way of working, new tools, new platforms and new standards while still providing modular, high-quality products that support new emerging services and ecosystems that could fit into different customer strategies.
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