MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS — Austin, Texas-based Transverse is leveraging virtualization technology to bring cloud-based billing and business support systems to market. The company introduced its Cloud Optimized blee(p) platform today in Barcelona to give service providers the inherent advantages of cloud computing including scalability, agility and reliability and integration to public cloud services.
Transverse’s business logic execution environment and platform, or blee(p), is an end-to-end billing solution that manages the entire lifecycle of any subscription, or usage-based payment agreement. The service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Web services-based platform now can be deployed in any virtual environment. This provides a reduction in total cost of ownership for back office operations. Part of these enhancements are interfaces for integrating to public cloud services such as inventory, fulfilment, eCommerce, and payment gateways, which further reduces the cost of ownership for billing and BSS.
“In today’s rapidly changing environment, service providers need the flexibility to quickly and easily deploy new services with minimal investment,” said Jim Messer, chief executive officer of Transverse. “Our latest product is an extension of the vision the company started out with and that is to take advantage of the technologies like SOA, Web services and virtualization to do that.”
Cloud Optimized blee(p) scales in both directions based on the communication service providers’ needs and eliminates the need for costly infrastructure. Through its interfaces, service providers can access cloud services such as billing and invoicing, customer care and self-care, mediation, rating, payments and increasingly service creation and other back office applications.
The privately funded startup is building on the launch of its Software-as-a-service version last year as well as winning the deal with iWireless to provide billing for all its rural operator partners.
“Running an application for a billing system in a cloud environment is not as simple as loading it up on a virtual machine and running it. There is lots of optimization that has to occur such as memory caching between virtual machines, pre-configuring those machines to launch and run applications, and managing the rating, mediation and hierarchical storage,” said Chris Couch, chief operating officer and co-founder of Transverse.
He said the idea behind cloud optimized blee(p) is that it has been technically constructed to uses specific tools such as Terracotta that allows them to take advantage of the cloud to share memory and build a different kind of scalability. “So you don’t have to think about it in the old-school way where you run things on a server and use a big database cluster. You don’t have that in a cloud,” Couch said.
