Livewire is Infosys’ blog for the emerging communications industry. Discuss the latest trends with our experts.

February 09, 2010

Billing as a Service

With Forbes dubbing "Everything as a Service" as one of the mega-trends of 2010, does it really apply to Telecom Billing as well? Well it turns out that the paradigm of "Billing as a service" is here to stay not only in 2010 but beyond, for the business benefits are far too many and way too compelling. As we know, in this model, the cost of buying and licensing the traditional enterprise software are thrown out of the window, and is replaced by a pay-per-subscription or a pay-per-usage model thereby drastically reducing the costs of operation. Billing as a service implies functions like pricing, product management, customer management, rating, billing and invoicing are available on a "pay per usage of service" model.

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Top 5 Challenges in Global Rollout of Billing System

Of late, many multi-national organizations are coming up with strategic plans to consolidate their billing systems across various geographies. This solution throws many advantages to the global companies in terms of controlling their costs, reducing operational issues, Centralization of data etc. This can also result in better program governance, change management and heavy reduction in duplication of IT Solutions. Many market leading billing packages offer flexibility to such requirements and can be very good fit here. On the other hand, Global Companies should also look at various potential issues they might face during consolidation and be prepared with mitigation strategies. Here are such top five challenges, as we have seen in our experience.

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February 05, 2010

Telecom Bill in a Customer friendly format in Multi service scenario

With the surge in telecom service providers’ offerings for value added services, telecom bill has become complex with plethora of information in the bill. The challenge lies in striking the balance between ease of use for customer in understanding the bill and the service provider’s ease of implementation.

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February 03, 2010

Billing and your Business Strategy

For success, every Business Strategy needs to pay requisite attention to a) what they want to charge their customers for and b) how to produce accurate bill & collect correct money. Although, this may sound like a first rule in business, many organizations – large and small, do not give adequate attention to this critical piece and end-up losing customers and fail to achieve their business goals.

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January 28, 2010

Importance of introducing new Billing systems for Media and Entertainment companies

Media and Entertainment industry is growing at a very fast pace with its extensive adoption in our lives. Whether its entertainment, information or media services, especially digital media, service provider’s aim is to provide easily available and affordable content to the end users in an efficient manner. To thrive in the current competitive environment, it is imperative for service providers to constantly increase interaction with its customers, retain existing customers and evolve new channels for revenue generation.  

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January 20, 2010

Need for transforming billing systems

To cope  with stiff competition, rapidly dwindling profit margins and ever increasing operational costs, Communication Service Provides (CSPs) are looking at various options to cut down costs, generate additional revenue from existing business models/systems and reduced lead time for new services’ launch.

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Convergence in Telecom billing

With changing consumer lifestyles, continuously evolving in providing new services has become the mantra for Communication service providers (CSPs) to sustain stiff competition. Traditional stovepipe billing systems support either voice, data, mobile or video services at a time. Investing in individual billing systems for each service type is not an optimal proposition from an operational as well as maintenance perspective. Also from a customer’s perspective, they are keen to opt for bundled services which include triple play (voice, data and video) and quadruple play (adding mobility to voice, data and video), instead of buying single individual services. 

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January 18, 2010

Telecoms: It’s time to Cloud-Source!

The players in the Telecom industry that emerge stronger post the recession will be the ones following the mantra: innovation with cost cutting. How can the telecom operators focus on the innovation game and at the same time keep a hawk eye on the concomitant costs of innovation? Perhaps the answer lies in Cloud Computing.  Cloud computing is the way ahead as demonstrated by some of the leading analyst commentaries: Gartner estimates one-third of IT spending in 2012 will be on cloud computing. Merrill Lynch has forecasted a $95 billion market opportunity over the next five years (as quoted in Saugatuck whitepaper). There are immense cost savings and attractive business transformation opportunities lying untapped in the cloud, the big question is “what and how” can be taken to the cloud with a cost effective, secure and high ROI centric approach. Amongst the telephone operators’ application portfolio,  e-billing/self-care/mobile-application-store lend themselves well to cloud migration  essentially because of factors like fluctuating load factor, none of them being a mission critical application, suitability to a transaction/subscription based charging model and commoditized IT capability.

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January 15, 2010

Reliable Billing Architecture for Telecom Service Providers

Most of the Telecom Service Providers do go for package-based Billing applications for their critical advantages over bespoke applications. Most of the rating and billing is happening using out of box functionalities offered by the COTS packages. In recent times, there is a major drift in services being offered to the end customers. More and more innovative products and services are being launched by the operators to retain their competitive stand in the market. Many of the leading billing packages are not capable enough to run at this pace of innovations in the product lines. Hence they fail to offer more than 80% of out of the box functionality to the operators, making the operator invest in customizing the package and making it complex, as they launch new product lines. Operators also lookout on putting a check on their license cost and expect the package do more for less.

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Challenges for telecom billing migration projects

The key drivers for a communication service provider’s (CSP) billing transformation can be summarized as follows:

§  Mergers and Acquisitions to sustain growth

§  Legal requirements from a regulatory body to provide fair service to customers at a competitive price

§  Consolidation of Business Support Systems to improve operational efficiencies

§  Technical requirements in case of vendor support discontinuation for hardware/OS/DB

§  Product vendor releases newer versions of the product.

During this transformation phase, CSPs have to deal with data migration and process changes in their OSS/BSS systems, particularly billing systems which are mission critical since any issues during billing migration directly impact revenues. Today, we see that most of the transformation projects are either delayed or get into effort overrun, adversely impacting cost and quality. Let us see the key challenges that CSPs face in adhering to the time lines and budgets of a billing transformation project:

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Billing system as a Cost optimizer in economic down turns

The most obvious and salient features of an effective billing system would be:

  •   Configure price plans and rates

  •   Capture call data effectively

  •   Rate calls accurately in a timely manner

  •   Generate bills on time and provide accurate invoice

But, with cut throat competition in the telecom sector, it is imperative for Communication service providers to constantly explore ways to differentiate in the market. Exploring the power of an effective billing system beyond the obvious outcomes would help the CSPs in the long run to reduce costs and generate new revenues. This will also help CSPs in gaining larger market share and retaining customer loyalty.

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January 13, 2010

Mobile Augmented Reality (AR) – Can it take off?

Mobile Applications market is growing at an unprecedented pace. Evolution in technology has enabled mobile devices to grow dramatically in features and computational capabilities. Innovation in the Mobile applications space is being fueled by the capabilities of the newer generation of devices and a growing number and success of Application Stores.

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January 04, 2010

Dawn of a new decade – Exciting times ahead for the Mobile industry

First of all, a very happy and prosperous new year 2010 to everyone out there. In this first post of 2010, I thought I will share my perspectives of what this new decade could hold for the Mobile industry.  Mobile industry has been a very interesting and a highly dynamic industry over the past decade. Mobile subscriptions have grown multi-fold across the world and we are seeing a big shift in the business models – revenues are now being driven by Data services more than it used to be by the Voice services.

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December 24, 2009

Making money in the App Store Economy

The new App economy has created a gold rush in which everyone (ISVs and individual “mom and pop” developers) is looking to cash in. Today, there are hundreds of thousands of Apps developed by thousands of developers. The success of an application and its ability to make money in this new gold rush depends on 2 factors – adoption and customer experience differentiation.

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December 14, 2009

Mobile Application Marketplaces – Where are we headed?

Smart phone market share is growing faster than ever before. Since iPhone was introduced, there has been a sudden surge in Smart phone adoption. Every Smart Phone maker is now trying to compete with Apple’s iPhone and it’s App Store. Mobile Application Stores, though not a new concept, kicked off with renewed vigor since the introduction of Apple’s App store which has already seen 2 billion downloads just a little more than a year since launch.

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December 12, 2009

Creating a differentiated experience - Key to App Store Success

The Application Marketplace phenomenon has spread like wild fire since the introduction of Apple’s App Store. Since then, it has caught the attention of almost every OEM and Operator who has launched (or in the process of launching) App Marketplaces. All the App Stores, together, now have hundreds of thousands of Apps developed by thousands of developers.

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