Telecom SOA Gets Real: The Role of a Billing Automation Platform

At a recent telecom conference, there was a session called, “The Killing of Billing?" I assume the session painted traditional billing as outdated compared to the latest charging and prepaid methods.

But from my vantage point, electronic and paper billing is not only growing, it’s easily the most popular and most cost-effective approach, especially for operators in developed markets like the United States. Even if you look at mobile broadband – the high end of the wireless market – postpaid billing is the runaway winner in that space.

Another assumption I challenge is the notion that billing innovation is at a standstill. Actually, plenty of innovation is occurring, but most of the progress is being made behind the scenes.

Here I would make a distinction between core and non-core billing processes. Core processes are the basic ones managed by commercial off-the-shelf software, such as mediation and rating. Yet where a lot of the new developments are taking place is in more routine – but essential – non-core processes such as billing testing, bill audits, and account updates across the B/OSS environment.

This is the area where my company, Diksha Technologies, has been carving out a niche. And to help educate and inform B/OSS readers like you on some of these “behind the curtain" billing innovations is my purpose in starting this new blog. We call the solution we sell a Billing Automation Platform and to better explain exactly what that is – and why you should care – I’ve organized what I want to say in a Q&A format. So here it goes …

Here’s a simple definition: A Billing Automation Platform is an open source-based framework that molds itself into your existing billing environment and allows you to automate a lot of the things that your main billing platform doesn’t cover. It lives and communicates with any of your existing systems, so no “rip and replace" is required.

It automates things like a payment/collection or bill-testing process. It’s also very useful in data validation – to check whether data from a system was properly translated as it flowed to another. And because the platform is SOA-based, it’s friendly to any Web service you want to plug into the environment.

What is the main reason to implement a billing automation platform?

Faster billing execution and lowering the cost of performing non-core billing tasks are probably the biggest reasons to invest. Even in a smaller sized telco, testing requires a team with a minimum of 15 to 20 people. And when you’re talking a larger telco where the users run into the millions, that number goes up quite a bit. Bharti Airtel in India, for example, has a team of 60 to 70 people in testing. Both COLT in Europe and OPTUS in Australia have a team of roughly 40 people in bill testing.

How different is the role of a Billing Automation Platform from that of standard integration middleware, such as those offered by a TIBCO or Vitria?

Integration middleware solutions are fairly generic tools that come with a very limited set of telco domain-specific hooks. To make them applicable in a billing environment requires putting quite a bit of work around them. Here’s where a billing automation platform adds value by maintaining a vendor-specific workflow pack, say for a Comverse or Oracle biller. The pack will already contain much of the non-core functionality that a telco is looking for.

Commercial off-the-shelf billing systems have been around for 20 years or more. What does a Billing Automation Platform do that COTS software doesn’t?

Commercial billing systems focus on core workflows. A Billing Automation Platform is software, but not off-the-shelf software in a traditional sense. It still requires some customization to insert into each unique telecom back office.

Now there’s nothing that says that non-core functions can’t be handled by a commercial billing system, but they usually are not included, which means you’re reduced to manual functions or you need to execute them using home-grown scripts.

Can you give us some examples of how a Billing Automation Platform would be useful?

Let’s say you have a billing cycle scheduled for a particular day of the month. The billing cycle is usually run manually and requires someone to be there to check if it’s running properly. And if there’s any error, they need to rerun the bill cycle again. Well, a Billing Automation Platform contains self-healing or auto-resolving capability, and so whenever the billing cycle is run and a certain type of error is encountered, it will try to correct it based on a set of rules you establish.

Another function is bill invoice formatting. Most operators already have a bill invoice formatter, but they often don’t use out-of-the-box functionality because it’s not very fast or high quality – and it’s somewhat cumbersome to modify the templates. So a Billing Automation Platform allows you to easily plug in an improved function like that. It becomes a convenient framework to hang SOA functionality from.

Prasad Bhargava is vice president of North American Sales at Diksha Technologies. He has more than 25 years of experience in the telecom industry and can be reached at Prasad.B@dikshatech.com.