Telecommunications industry executives filled a packed reception to watch Billing World and OSS Today magazine editors announce the award recipients of the Billing & OSS World 2004 Excellence Awards. The ceremony was held in Washington, D.C., as part of the Billing & OSS World 2004 conference and exhibition, which brought together more than 1,500 telecom professionals and 115 exhibitors and sponsors for the three-day event.
Best Overall Company
The award for Best Overall Company, which recognizes overall excellence in the billing and OSS industry, went to Convergys.
Convergys had an outstanding year in all aspects of its business. The company supports billing and customer care for more than 120 operators in 40 countries with more than 120 million subscribers. In addition, Convergys directly runs billing operations for more than 70 million subscribers in its own data centers.
Convergys’ systems manage about 40 percent of U.S. wireless subscribers, 30 percent of U.S. cable subscribers and 95 percent of U.S. cable telephony subscribers.
Convergys’ Infinys product, which was released in 2003, has had enormous success throughout the world. Since March 2003, contract wins for Convergys include, Brasil Telecom, Sprint, China Unicom, Satelindo, BT Retail, SmarTone, Telewest Broadband, TV Cabo and Cox Communications.
Operational Excellence
This year, Capgemini received the award for Operational Excellence for its work with Nextel. Capgemini was tasked with preparing Nextel to handle LNP fallout transactions in real time.
Duplicate transactions, system outages, unexpected system behavior, configuration challenges and a significant CSR learning curve plagued the project in the first few days. However, it was at this point that Capgemini focused its attention on an aggressive schedule to address these unforeseen challenges. The company was able to overcome all of these hurdles.
Since the go-live date of LNP, average resolution time to process fallout transactions at the Nextel/Capgemini center has plummeted by 75 percent; CSR efficiency has increased by 70 percent; and overall productivity within the fallout center has increased by more than 300 percent.
Achievement in Innovation
The award for Achievement in Innovation went to Info Directions for its development of the CostGuard.NET system on Microsoft’s .NET framework.
One of the company’s first customers on its new platform was Access Point. Access Point had outgrown its second billing system since being founded in 1996. The company wanted to invest in a product and company that could carry it into the future. Access Point selected Info Directions in June 2003 and converted to use of the new system in December.
By moving to the CostGuard.NET system, Access Point has decreased its data processing and cycle production costs by about 20 percent. It also attained a 50-percent decrease in its production time for bill cycle processing and delivery, removing days from its cycle production process. The company has also been able to decrease the number of call back service calls from between 10 and 15 percent. In addition, Access Point’s time to order completion has been dropped by 19 percent.
Best Integration Project
This year the winner for Best Integration Project went to Sheer Networks for its network management strategy deployment with Korea Telecom (KT) to help combat virus attacks and to prevent devastating network outages. KT is one of the largest telecommunications service providers in the world, over whose networks more than half of Korea’s Internet traffic travels.
The company’s networks were paralyzed by repeated virus attacks, such as the Sapphire worm. To prevent devastating network outages and degradation of network performance, KT chose an integrated team comprised of Sheer Networks, Narus and leading Asian integrator Datacraft Korea.
The partnership yielded a robust distributed denial of service (DDoS) detection and prevention platform based on Sheer’s DDoS Protection system. With advanced Traffic Auditing & Provisioning on KT’s IP backbone network, network-based DDoS attacks can now be discovered before they occur. Because of real-time alerts, KT can utilize protection measures to minimize service downtime and disruption to customers.
Best Customer Success Story
The winner of the award for best customer success story went to Syndesis. Syndesis’ work with a leading Fortune 50 company that delivers data, voice and Internet services has led to flow-through provisioning for ATM and frame relay services, as well as an overhaul of maintenance operations.
By automating network uploads and service discovery, providing an integrated topology database of physical and logical resources, and identifying billing, OSS and network discrepancies, the provider has drastically improved its network utilization and technology introduction capabilities.
With Syndesis, the provider’s flow-through provisioning and activation has eliminated error-prone manual procedures—reducing time-to-service from 10 minutes to just seconds. ISP moves involving 4,000 or more services once took the provider more than 30 days using 10 dedicated resources; now, the same move is performed automatically within a single maintenance window.
Most Promising New Company
P-Cube was recognized at the Most Promising New Company. When P-Cube joined the OSS industry, its mission was to help mobile and wireline IP service providers optimize their network investments and enable next-generation content services. The company’s Encharge prepaid/postpaid billing product provides real-time analysis and policy-based charging at the application layer, which gives providers the ability to know exactly what is happening within their systems at a very granular level. P-Cube’s solution incorporates 3 patents and uses an additional 24 that are in the application approval process.
P-Cube’s management team consists of industry veterans from such firms as HP, AT&T, Excite@Home, 3Com, Cisco, Nortel Networks and National Semiconductor. And, the company has secured $70 million in funding from leading venture capital firms. P-Cube also boasts partnerships with distributors around the world and a customer list that includes NTT DoCoMo, SingTel, Telenor and Korea Telecom.
Best New Product
This year, the editorial panel selected Cramer as the winner in the category of Best New Product. In 2003, Cramer completely overhauled its flagship inventory management product with the release of Cramer5. After a 2-year research and development effort, Cramer has evolved its product with the requirements of today’s market.
Realizing that mergers and acquisitions are an ongoing reality among carriers in all telecom segments, Cramer has made migration easier by maintaining the development of a single code line from Cramer4 to Cramer5. Other features of Cramer’s upgrade process include simplified application deployment through a Web client, automated configuration and support for Cramer4 customizations.
Instead of managing inventory data, Cramer5 manages the inventory itself and takes on the responsibility for running the processes that change the inventory, a feature for which Tier 1 operators have been asking.
Currently, Cramer5 is being implemented by a European wireless operator, which will finish its upgrade process by the middle of the year.
Best Bill
The award in the category of Best Bill was given to OSG Billing Services for its work with Cavalier Telephone. Cavalier employed OSG Billing Services to change its bill layout to address the expansive call detail records and to reduce the number of pages.
OSG designed a bill that maximized a landscaped page design to include three columns of detail versus one. OSG’s Dynamic Messaging product allowed Cavalier to control the design of messages to customers on the bill, and the new design emphasized important aspects of the bill through targeted use of highlight color.
OSG’s bill redesign lowered Cavalier’s production and mailing costs by more than 9 percent and reduced printing and mailing costs by 16 percent. The cost of the project was recovered in just one month.
The Billing & OSS World 2004 Excellence Awards finalists:
Best Overall Company
- Amdocs
- Cramer Systems
- Convergys Corp.
- MetaSolv Software
- Openet Telecom
- Telcordia Technologies
Operational Excellence
- Capgemini
- CSG Systems
- DST Output
- Lucent Technologies
- River Rock Systems
- Sheer Networks
- Telution Inc.
- CommSoft
- Fathom Solutions
- Info Directions Inc.
- Lavastorm Technologies
- NetCracker Technology
- ’nTels Co. Ltd.
- Telution Inc.
Best Integration Project
- Ace*Comm
- Bercut Ltd.
- Enhanced Telecommunications Inc.
- Marconi
- Sentori Inc.
- Sheer Networks
Customer Success Story
- Connexn Technologies
- Enhanced Telecommunications Inc.
- Intec Telecom Systems
- Fathom Solutions
- Mantas Inc.
- MetaSolv Software
- Syndesis
Most Promising New Company
- BlueSpring Software Inc.
- P-Cube
- Pronto Networks
- Valista
Best New Product
- Brix Networks
- ComArch
- Convergys Corp.
- Cramer
- Info Directions Inc.
- Syndesis
