FEATURE BILLING
experience from end to end. And that’s only
just beginning to become more prevalent in
the telecommunications industry,” she says.
“Operators are now recognising the need to
manage the customer experience right from
the bill data coming through into the system
that creates the bills and translating that all
the way through to the customer experience,
in the call centre or in web self care. That’s
where this integrated end to end customer
communication management becomes so
important to give the operators advantage,”
she says.
Convergent billing itself can offer tremendous
cost savings, say the system vendors.
And so as carriers are beginning to update
their billing equipment they are acutely
conscious of the need to avoid replicating
the current problems that they have with
multiple legacy systems. But this creates
a problem all of its own. How can carriers
and vendors design billing systems for
future environments when there is limited
visibility as to how those environments will
look? To get a feel for how tricky this could
be, you only have to imagine yourself designing
a billing system in 2000 that would be
expected to cope with the range of services
on offer today.
“The one thing we’re never going to be
sure of,” says Gary Bunnie, “is what’s going
to be needed in five years’ time. And nobody
is. We have to make sure that the system is
flexible enough to be able to cope with the
unexpected.”
That’s a pretty tall order. And because
Bunnie is quite right—because nobody
really knows what carriers will be billing
for and how they will be billing for it in
the future—discussions of how this order
can be met are vague in nature. ‘Flexibility’
and ‘openness’ are the two most frequently
occurring words as vendors talk of designing
systems that are built simply to bill for
anything, rather than to bill for something
specific. It could be monthly WiMAX usage,
or it could be streamed music.
“This kind of openness can empower the
carriers’ marketing departments,” says Gordon
Rawlings, senior marketing director for
Oracle Communications. “It will give them the
ability to flex and change offers themselves
without going through the historical timeto-market
difficulties which were forced on
organisations because of the rigidity of the
IT systems. It will give them options as they
move forwards.”
‘Flexibility’ and ‘openness’
are the two most
frequently occurring
words as vendors talk of
designing systems
It is an industry trend that operators in
developing markets are benefiting from
the pioneering work done by their opposite
numbers in more mature territories—a phenomenon
that has been illustrated repeatedly
throughout history since the industrial
revolution in Great Britain. In cellular billing
this is offering emerging market carriers some
significant advantages.
With shorter histories and, in many cases,
less highly advanced service offerings, they
have not had the opportunity to accumulate
such complex, labyrinthine billing environments.
“They might be able to miss out the
stage of putting down discrete billing systems
that just manage specific services and
go straight to a converging billing system,”
says Gary Bunnie.
Gordon Rawlings sees evidence of large
international players taking advantage of
developing market dynamics to explore the
opportunities afforded by convergent billing.
“What we’re seeing increasingly is that
these global group structures are working
out their IT landscapes and target environments
as a whole, building that out in the
eastern properties and taking the knowledge
back into the more mature markets. So that
group interplay is an interesting thing with
people trying things in different territories.
If it’s successful they can pull it back into
other territories.”
46 Mobile Communications International | First for news, best for business
Emerging territories come with their own issues,
of course, principally the remarkable rates
of growth by which many are characterised.
Intec’s Bunnie works with Indian operator Reliance
as a customer, which expects to grow from
around 30 million customers today to as much
as 100 million within the next three years.
“We have to have the capability with these
guys to scale our systems to a level that we
haven’t had to achieve before. That keeps us
on our toes as we make sure our systems can
scale without our customers having any great
hardship when that happens. But that has
benefits for customers across the world. Our
customers in developing markets are pushing
us hard and the guys in developed markets
feel very comfortable with that because they
know they’re going to reap the benefits.”
Billing system vendors are indeed being
pushed hard. Research from Informa Telecoms
& Media’s OSS/BSS Analyst service found that
total contract announcements in the sector
for the year ending June 2008 fell to 743—a
drop of almost ten per cent on the previous
year—and only two per cent up on the number
for the year to June 2002.
The result in the sector—as in the wider infrastructure
environment—is that vendors are
looking to managed services as a new revenue
stream; one that offers greater predictability
and longevity, if not such attractive margins.
In many cases, the billing specialists have their
managed service bundled in by larger vendors
like Ericsson, or big systems integrators.
Billing has always suffered from a comparative
lack of glamour in the world of cellular operations.
But as the range of services and pricing
models on offer continues to grow with no signs
of abatement, billing becomes even more crucial
to the competitive success of the carriers.
“I think the OSS and BSS environments remain
incredibly important parts of the service
provider’s business,” says Rawlings. “At the
end of the day we control the mission critical
applications. Increasingly there’s a focus on us
helping [carriers] understand how these investments
help them both on their top line as well
as their bottom line. And you need to help them
understand that we’re going to be with them
as we go through this environment.”
As the industry moves towards the fourth
generation there should be an increased drive
to update billing systems in preparation for yet
another new phase of the industry’s life. But in
reality only the lucky few carriers will be able
to implement the kind of fully converged billing
systems that they would truly like to have. ■
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