2002 Billing World Excellence Award Recipients

The telecom billing industry converged on Baltimore, Md., in June for the TeleStrategies 2002 Billing World Conference and Exhibition. To kick off the show, the staff of Billing World & OSS Today presented awards to companies that have shown innovation, dedication to their customers and proven success.

Overall Product: Convergys

This year’s award for overall excellence went to Convergys for its exceptional leadership, dominance in several key industry segments and ability to develop innovative products.

Convergys received the award for its broad range of products, which cover cable, wireless and IP billing. The company’s Atlys wireless billing product has been benchmarked at supporting 20 million subscribers, and the latest version of the product is currently in production at sites with as many as 10 million subscribers.

The company’s ICOMS cable billing product has helped Convergys become a leader in this space as well. The product is in use at some of the biggest cable providers, including Comcast, Cox Communications, Altrio Communications and CableDirect.

In addition to supporting wireless and cable providers, Convergys has also shown that it can branch out to innovative new services. For example, XM Satellite Radio is working with Convergys on integrated contact center services for subscriber management, billing-related customer service and fulfillment.

Convergys’ 2001 acquisition of Geneva Technology has only strengthened the company’s position in the billing and customer care market.

New Product: MoreMagic

This year, MoreMagic was honored as the new entrant to the billing scene. It has shown an understanding of service providers’ needs and the expertise to create functionality that providers demand.

MoreMagic’s carrier-class, cross-platform mobile payment system enables dynamic pricing and payment for all forms of network services, content, and applications over all 2G, 2.5G and 3G networks. Its flexibility allows providers, content providers and merchants to implement new business models and offer various price structures and payment methods.

This type of innovation hasn’t gone unnoticed in the industry, as the company received $9 million in second-round funding in 2002.

MoreMagic’s customers include Motorola, which uses the company’s Mbroker software platform for authentication and payments, including micropayments for shopping, games and other applications. Nokia uses the MoreMagic platform in its Nokia Payment Solution, which mediates payments among financial institutions, merchants and consumers.

Achievement in Innovation: Telution

This new category focused on cutting-edge technology that addresses previously unsolved problems. It includes innovative strategies or products that create new revenue streams or define and give substance to a new market niche.

Telution was honored for its work with Texas-based CLEC EZTalk, which offers prepaid local phone service to customers who can’t get service due to bad credit.

Telution automated EZTalk’s payment receipt processes across a network of more than 800 retail outlets in 21 states, providing convenient customer access and real-time account updates to ensure consistent customer service and cash flow for EZTalk.

The system automatically reminds customers when the next pre-payment is due and suspends accounts that remain unpaid five days after the due date—without user intervention.

The use of a workflow engine to synchronize activity across the processes for ordering, provisioning, billing, payment validation and customer communication ensures that the network status is always the same as the billing status.

Operational Excellence: Sentori

This new award highlighted companies that have created initiatives that produce significant improvements in customer operational performance.

Sentori worked with Excel Wireless to convert the provider’s system from a legacy platform to Sentori’s suite of products for activation, provisioning, mediation, billing and customer care in a service bureau environment.

As a result, Excel Wireless experienced significant operational improvements, including a 90 percent decrease in entry-related errors, a 35 percent decrease in cycle processing time and a decrease in customer handling time to an average 150 seconds.

This translates to a 37 percent decrease in call center volume and a 23 percent reduction in required CSR person-hours, saving Excel more than $1.3 million annually.

Integration Project: Cap Gemini Ernst & Young

Making a client’s back office run smoothly can be the ultimate challenge for systems integrators and vendors alike. Integrating multivendor systems, handling multiple languages and currencies, and building teams with members working from different continents can be the difference between a successful project and a failure.

Cap Gemini Ernst & Young’s integration team worked on a project with Nextel Communications that involved consolidating 14 systems and 11 databases. The project involved a team of 750 people working in three countries across six time zones.

Cap Gemini’s team performed test planning and auditing for thousands of invoices during multiple conversions for billing assurance. The integration team also customized Nextel’s accounts receivables module to handle functionalities specific to wireless.

Cap Gemini helped Nextel meet its goals on time and on budget, while increasing overall operational effectiveness.

CRM: Amdocs

The customer is the single most important aspect of any telecom provider’s business, and being able to get a clear understanding of the customer is imperative.

In November 2001, Amdocs acquired the Clarify CRM assets from Nortel, positioning Amdocs as a leader in the CRM space.

Amdocs worked with E-Plus, a German mobile provider with about 7.5 million subscribers, to replace six disparate systems with a single integrated CRM product. E-Plus uses the system to log hundreds of network activities and trouble tickets daily. The number of phone calls to the service center has been cut by 25 percent, and the time needed to relay information to field engineers has been cut by 50 percent. Since deploying the new system, E-Plus has logged a 55 percent increase in customer satisfaction.

Wireless Billing: Portal Software

Whether service providers upgrade to 2.5G or 3G, they must rely on a solid wireless billing platform that will support next-generation services and give them the pricing flexibility they require.

Portal’s customers include some of the top names in the mobile world. They include China Mobile, Glocalnet, T-mobile, Telenor Mobile, Telia Mobile and Vodafone UK. These customers are using Portal’s Infranet for such next-generation services and capabilities as convergent rating and billing, content billing for a variety of technologies, prepaid revenue assurance, support for multiple locations around the world and revenue sharing with content partners.

E-Plus, Germany’s third-largest wireless operator, is using Infranet to bill for i-mode services and GPRS packet usage, which Portal’s professional services team implemented in less than five months.

The latest version of Infranet supports prepaid and postpaid wireless voice and data over GSM, CDMA and UMTS on a single platform.

Mediation: Intec Telecom Systems

Mediation systems have to deal with voice and data going over different networks and through multiple interfaces using standard and proprietary formats. It takes a lot of engineering to create a mediation system that can grab and identify those different kinds of traffic and sort them out.

Intec Telecom Systems has more than 110 clients using its Inter-mediatE product in 20 countries. HanseNet, a German carrier, uses the product to help it rapidly deliver customized service packages to corporate clients. Intec was able to collect data from many different network elements, including Web servers, video servers and routers.

Intec’s real-time architecture can mediate more than 12 billion events in a 10-hour day.