The concept of a single view of the customer has long been an elusive goal for most telecom carriers. One of the problems has been the lack of integration of front-end and back-end systems that, if brought together, could show much more about the customer than how much they spent on long distance last month.
In a response to the market, Lucent and Oracle recently integrated Lucent’s Kenan Arbor/BP billing product with Oracle’s E-Business Suite. This product will combine data that traditionally sits on different systems to give service providers far more details about the customer for marketing purposes and reducing churn. It could allow end-users to manage themselves through self-care and self-provisioning, things that are high on the CRM wish list.
“I think this will lead to the rapid introduction of many new services, which will especially benefit end customers,” says Kenan Sahin, president of Lucent’s Software Products Group and vice president of software technologies at Bell Laboratories. Sahin adds that historically, integrating billing systems with CRM has proven to be very difficult, cumbersome and time consuming.
“These have traditionally been two separate entities and even though there might be established, open interfaces, everyone has their own peculiar method of implementing it, and it tends not to be as easy and straightforward a task as it was probably intended to be,” says Jim Alsman, OSS program leader at Frost & Sullivan.
Alsman adds that the advantages of bringing the two types of systems together include giving customers faster and easier access to billing information. “If they aren’t integrated, customers have to go through a couple of irrelevant systems to get to where the data that answers their question resides,” he says. Alsman also says that customers might be able to access actual call records and perform functions like changing their service features and options.
The integration work with Oracle’s software took six months, with engineers working on both sides. The companies hope the combined product will be relatively easy to install and maintain. The companies are initially targeting existing customers of Arbor/BP and Oracle E-Business Suite. Other target markets include companies that need a new system or want to shift from a service bureau model to in-house.
Working with Lucent on this project made much more sense than trying to develop its own billing system, says Jay Nussbaum, executive vice president of Oracle. He adds that while customers are free to tie Oracle’s product in to any billing system, Oracle itself will not get into as deep of an agreement with other billing vendors. “We intend not to bid with anybody else on the billing side because the integration is so critical that we do not want to have any other partners to put the level of effort that we’re putting into this,” he says.
This alliance is probably much more important for Lucent’s Kenan group than it is for Oracle. Some might argue that Kenan could really use a hit right now so the billing market doesn’t leave it behind. “They are no Amdocs, but by the same token, they don’t let time stand still,” Alsman says. “Now, they [Kenan] have the might of Lucent behind them, and it’s made some difference.”
The combined billing/CRM product is scheduled for release in the fourth quarter of 2000.
Email this article
Add a comment
Printer version
Order reprints
RSS Feed
Bookmark article