HP Reveals Stable of Real-time Charging Customers

HP named five service provider customers for its real-time charging solution Tuesday, which demonstrates both the demand for this type or charging as well as HP’s strength in emerging markets.

China Telecom, FASTWEB in Italy, Telcel in Mexico, VimpelCom in Russia, and Polkomtel in Poland in Poland have all deployed GP’s RealTime Charging solution in the last six to 24 months.

“It’s good that a broad gamut of customers have had a pleasant enough experience {implementing RealTime Charging} that they are comfortable enough to join us in this release,” said Nigel Upton, general manager of business support systems in the Communications, Media & Entertainment group at HP.

The system enables precise, customer-centric pricing models that help emerging and other telecom operators expand revenue with high-value services. By managing the entire charging and authorization function, HP RealTime Charging enables operators to provide information instantly on pricing and a customer’s ability to purchase.

Marek Jachmann, mediation manager at Polkomtel said in a statement that, "On-line charging and IMS compliance have opened new challenges. Having a long-time relationship with HP will help us to successfully implement new models.”

The solution is based on industry standard protocols such as Diameter. It uses a modular architecture and can integrate with legacy and new generation billing infrastructures as well as newer networks and Internet Protocol Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) environments.

“Carriers are tired of having one tightly-integrated stack from one vendor and being totally at their mercy as costs go out of control,” Upton said. “This {open} approach gives them not just a better price point, but the flexibility to deploy an architecture they can swap and change as they see fit.”

Larry Goldman, co-founder and senior analyst at OSS Observer (acquired last month by Analysys Mason), said it is critical for all communications service providers to have a real-time charging environment to offer and support a wide range of prepaid and postpaid services. “Real-time charging is one of the most significant enablers of increased revenue. HP has a strong position via its HP Internet Usage Manager, its OpenCall software portfolio, and its global systems integration capability,” Goldman said.

The components Goldman mentioned are the key modules for the charging solution. In addition to the IUM and OpenCall Service Access Controller, the solution includes the HP OpenCall Media Platform and technologies from [HP’s industry partners, such as Amdocs, HighDeal and Oracle.

China Telecom is using HP’s charging solution to support 3G services with both pre-paid and post-paid capability, beginning in the Anhui Province. Fastweb is using it to enhance revenues with flexible, revenue-generating “quad-play” bundles.

Telcel, a mobile operator in Mexico with more than 51 million customers, needs to offer new data services and with HP’s Real-Time Charging was able to extend the new services portfolio to its large base of pre-paid customers. Russia’s VimpelCom, with 250 million customers, was looking for a solution to provide the transaction performance and scalability it needed to accommodate rapid growth.

Polkomtel, is Poland’s first 3G operators and has more than 14 million customers. It looked to HP provide the standards-based foundation for new services and revenue growth on its evolving IMS network.

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