Say goodbye to the relative simplicity of billing for traditional telephony. As the industry moves toward more IP-based services, billing systems must be more flexible, allowing carriers to react quickly to market demands.
Billing systems will have to deal with more complex services, more kinds of services and more demand for services, says Alan Gilbert, vice president of strategic alliances for Guidecomm Inc.
"When you start to roll all of that stuff together, the complexity of the billing system is orders of magnitude greater," Gilbert says.
If today's billers are going to meet service providers' needs they must consider the demand IP-based traffic brings. That means having a system designed to allow addition of new services without fundamentally changing the system.
One example is Sentori Inc.'s Billing and Customer Care system, which provides for real-time rating and multi-service billing. The system has an object-oriented architecture that allows service providers to change their product and service offerings as well as their pricing and discount plans quickly without changing the software's coding.
"For any billing system, in order for them to support a market that is constantly changing, the only way to differentiate or support a service provider is being able to have flexibility, and the flexibility has to be from the architecture itself," says Vincent Vu, CEO and founder of Sentori, formerly ASC Billing Solutions Inc. "It cannot be through any patching ... (where) you write additional code to patch or support or accommodate the new feature set.
"It has to be built into the architecture," Vu continues. "Through the architecture it will have the flexibility to allow you to support the new feature with ease. If you're continuing to do this incremental code writing without having some architectural thought behind it, it will collapse in terms of the feature sets."
Though service providers have invested a lot of money in recent years to handle and to rate IP events, "they have not, in general, been able to handle the wide variety of network interfaces and network data formats that we've been seeing," says Jim Meginley, president of Intec Telecom Systems Ltd.'s mediation business. "We believe that, though IP billing systems are very capable today in terms of rating and processing IP events, there is no question that mediation systems need to interface to the network with new, complex protocols and new and complex data formats to get the data ready for the IP biller to do the rating and billing function."
Service providers may use a billing system for residential customers--where the needs require a lower degree of complexity--and a different billing system for their high-volume, commercial customers. The ones for commercial customers would have to perform more complex processing, such as offering tiered levels and value-added services to their top 100 or 1,000 customers.
Flat-rate billing may ease some of the complexities service providers will face, but the providers will have to determine how to differentiate themselves from their competition, Meginley says.
For example, in the ISP market, value-added, per-event-type billable functions were added on top of the monthly, flat-rate service charge.
"So, certainly a great dynamic right now is the issue of how I make money as a service provider vs. the complexity of the billing models I throw to my customers because my customers will choose what they perceive to be the most business-effective, business-efficient billing model," Meginley says.
Rating Proves Critical
Rating is a primary concern as carriers introduce services that may be billed in various ways such as a flat rate, in tiers or location.
"When you look at all the combinations and permutations of the ways in which things can be priced and rated, it's given us the notion that the complexity of the rating engine needs to really improve," says Peter Green, vice president and general manager of the customer care and billing unit of Telcordia Technologies Inc.
"Not only is the complexity going up--and we're addressing that through rules-based rating engines rather than fixed, tubular rating engines--but we're also increasing the speed of the rating throughput because the number of transactions is going to increase, too," Green says.
Meginley adds, "The billing systems are inherently going to get more complicated as more and more services are added and more (service providers) are trying to figure out ways of generating revenue." He adds that it has been in his company's experience "that nothing ever becomes less complicated. You just have more technology and, as more services are added, I think more complex billing models will evolve."
Meginley also says, "It will get more complex as time goes by. I don't think it's going to get any easier."
| The Links |
Guidecomm Inc. www.guidecomm.net Intec Telecom Systems Ltd. www.intec-telecom-systems.com Sentori Inc. www.sentori.com Telcordia Technologies Inc. www.telcordia.com |
