Convergin Service Interaction Covers Real-Time Charging

Service providers that have seized the opportunity to extend their legacy services to their IP environments now have a new option for enabling true converged real-time charging across those domains. Convergin introduced this week an addition to its service capability interaction manager (SCIM) offering that enables the charging for blended services in legacy, next-generation and IMS networks.

Convergin is a provider of service interaction and service mediation solutions. It’s Accolade WCS solutions now enable true, converged real-time charging across networks, technologies, and devices, including service delivery platforms. As the first solution to introduce comprehensive, real-time charging mediation for Service Delivery Platforms, the solution allows both the delivery and charging of blended services in converged networks. Any communication session from any network, mediated by the Accolade WCS, can be charged or rated in real-time by any IMS-compliant Online Charging system.

“We allow services to be developed and executed on the IP domain as well being executed on the legacy network, but now we can also accelerate the time to market for newer players,” said Ayal Itzkovitz, CEO of Convergin.

The system also enables the convergence of Prepaid and Postpaid charging, and supports richer, real-time credit control capabilities, as well as unified subscriber management.

Convergin now allows service providers to horizontally expose their legacy and next-generation signaling networks to IMS-based online charging platforms. The new charging mediation capabilities utilize the standardized Ro/Rf diameter interfaces to introduce unified charging and billing solutions that address key requirements of the converged network evolution.

Using the Accolade WCS, operators can choose from several migration paths. For instance, they can replace legacy IN Prepaid platforms with new, flexible, online charging solutions; consolidate prepaid and postpaid billing platforms into a single unified charging and billing solution; or utilize investments made in IMS/SDP deployments toward the existing legacy networks and cap investments in the legacy domain.

Having spent its formative years enabling service delivery of call control-based services between legacy and SIP environments, Convergin believes this new extension to real-time charging will help service providers take better advantage of blended services.

“IMS is not growing as fast as the industry hoped, but the services side of IMS is going very fast, so we see the need to enable service delivery even before the network has moved to IMS,” Itzkovitz said.

As a provider of migration solutions, this pace of migration is good for Convergin, but also for its service provider customers who can get the benefit of next-generation services while taking its time investing in new network infrastructure.

To that point, Itzkovitz said the Accolade WCS enables service providers to build a powerful horizontal service control layer that merges call control, service control and charging capabilities across any network and any communication method.

In addition to its partnerships with Tier 1 network equipment manufacturers and providers of IP network gear, and based on this new extension to the RTC platforms, Convergin is building partnerships with billing vendors, many of which do not have assets and capabilities in the core network.

Part of Convergin’s goal is to use its technology and solutions to drive more convergence in the network, as well as migrate the network from many vertical domains to more horizontal ones.

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