Putting the Billing Pieces in Place
©RCR Wireless - June 11,
2007 - Kelly Hill
Despite the prevalence of end-to-end
billing systems as operators have consolidated in recent years,
some companies may prefer a one-shot solution to a particular
problem without the expense and effort of replacing an entire
system.
According to Forrester Research senior
analyst Michele Pelino, service providers might seek out a
“best of breed” approach when they want to pick
and choose among vendors for the best solution to address
a particular billing issue, such as activation or real-time
billing. Or, providers may simply not want to be tied to a
single, end-to-end vendor for billing and OSS solutions due
to the inherently weaker negotiating position.
“In some cases, they also have
some of those pieces of the puzzle in place, so using that
end-to-end system isn’t what they want to do. They’re
trying to fill in gaps in functionality or capability that
they need to support new types of services to broaden their
capability,” said Pelino.
Companies such as Highdeal Inc. offer
those types of pieces-and-parts to service providers, counting
among its clients Canadian telco Videotron, content management
company Motricity Inc. and more than 170 implementations of
its services in 50 countries.
Topsy-turvy
In the past five years, “It’s
becoming increasingly obvious that the reality is that the
mobile market is getting turned upside down, with voice margins
falling and data services becoming much more prominent—and
with those data services, much more of the value chain involves
third parties bringing services to the market,” said
David McNierney, vice president of market development for
the Americas at Highdeal.
The change has put stress on back-office
systems, he added, and billing vendors with end-to-end systems
have become “a jack of all trades, master of none.”
The pressure toward convergence also has contributed to the
need for more agile and adaptable billing components, McNierney
said, and so companies such as Highdeal are stepping forth
with alternatives to the end-to-end.
Kip Turco, Motricity’s senior
vice president of engineering and operations, said that his
company had existing back-office operations, but adding the
Highdeal component made things easier to manage and more operationally
efficient.
As the company has experienced what
Turco called “exponential growth,” he said the
Highdeal piece of the company’s billing system has helped
automate the application of contracts, such as revenue sharing;
made adding customers and new contracts easier; and provided
a clear and simple audit trail.
“Once you have something that
automates the contract and how you pay things, it kind of
points to some efficiency that can be gained by changing a
process or putting a process in place,” Turco said.
He agreed that billing has become substantially more complicated
in the past few years, with more parties involved in the food
chain and the necessary infrastructure to handle the differences
in billing and settling payments for content such as mobile
games versus ringtones, for example.
New pieces, more challenges
As IMS evolves into an active part of
wireless billing systems, the architecture offers the promise
that service providers will essentially be able to choose
multiple pieces of billing with plug-and-play capabilities
as the underlying architecture should allow seamless integration.
McNierney said that Highdeal believes IMS will be key to the
evolution of billing systems. However, whether things will
actually play out that way remains to be seen, since companies
will likely implement IMS differently.
Still, as David Sharpley, vice president
of marketing and alliances at Oracle noted, the larger trend
for consolidation among operators has meant that large carriers
generally are looking to simplify their billing systems—but
he added, there are instances where the company has provided
just mediation, rating or bill presentation products for companies.
“I think the general trend is
to simplify, but some operators have their own approach to
these things and have systems that they prefer for certain
tasks, and we see that in the market,” Sharpley said.
Some of the challenges that smaller
companies face when trying to compete in the billing space,
Pelino said, include proving themselves to be a steady supplier
and not a fly-by-night operation without long-term stability—a
potential credibility question that larger billing vendors
don’t have to deal with. Vendors need to keep current
with IMS trends, which operators expect, as well as convince
carriers of their ability to scale and provide reliable service,
Pelino said.
“We’re seeing more of a
move to end-to-end, but that doesn’t mean the pieces
of the puzzle aren’t important,” Pelino added.
“Carriers are not going to take out what they have in
place. They’ll transition over time to more of an end-to-end
system, and in the meantime the pieces that they need, they’re
going to have to fill in.” < |
