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Mauritel Mobiles Selects Intec
Mauritel Mobiles recently purchased Intec’s Interconnect v7 and Intec Interconnect PREP, key components of Intec’s preintegrated Wholesale Business Management solution, which enables operators to trade, route, mediate, bill and settle for wholesale traffic.
“We expect the implementation to significantly improve control of multi-party interconnect costs and revenues for traditional services and to enable the launch of new value-added services,” said Noreddine Boumzebra, director general of Mauritel Mobiles. “We also expect the system to deliver enhanced decision support with better reporting, alerting, analysis, and trend perception. Ultimately, increased productivity, better management decisions, lowered interconnect costs, differentiated offerings and more professional trading in the market can only impact positively on our operational efficiency and our margins.”
Telcordia Names Mark Greenquist as New President and CEO
Telcordia announced that Mark Greenquist has been named the company’s new president and CEO. Greenquist had been its CFO since 2005. Previously, he was CFO at both Symbol Technologies and Agere Systems.
The former president and CEO, Daniel J. Carroll, will retain his position on the Telcordia board of directors. Carroll became CEO of Telcordia in 2005 after serving as COO of the Business Communications Services Division at Lucent Technologies, where he was responsible for a $7 billion global business.
Convergys Introduces Solution to Maximize Customer Value
Convergys has launched its new Lifetime Value Optimizer solution, which takes aim at reducing inconsistent policy decisions by customer-interfacing employees and systems. By providing a centralized engine to capture all customer events across all channels, automatically evaluating those events against policies, the product executes appropriate actions. It addresses the problem of non-integrated operational systems, which add to the challenge of enabling seamless customer service across automated and live agent service channels.
The product enables communications providers to fix the value of each customer and deliver customer-specific care that maximizes profits across the account life cycle. With built in scalability, it is designed to handle a Tier 1 customer base, integrates with legacy systems and works in real time. For example, it offers royal treatment for high-value customers, targeted cross- and up-sell offers, tailored products and personal care. Likewise, it suggests margin-driven treatment for other customers, geared to achieve retention in line with the customer’s profit potential.
Lifetime Value Optimizer is based on a process called Customer Lifecycle Management developed by the consulting firm McKinsey & Company. The solution has been undergoing pilot testing in recent months, and Convergys reports that two additional client implementations are underway.
Shaw Upgrades with Sigma
Shaw Communications, the largest broadband cable television supplier in Western Canada, has upgrade with Sigma to its Service Management Platform (SMP) 3.0 broadband data and voice service package. SMP is a real-time intelligent service activation and fulfillment platform that is based on J2EE for managing triple and quad play services. Shaw will use the new version to upgrade its existing provisioning platform and to manage services such as high-speed data, digital phone and business voice. Shaw will also leverage SMP for future IP services, such as IMS-based multimedia services and fixed-mobile convergence.
RateIntegration and IBRIX Launch New Product
Rating company RateIntegration and IBRIX, a provider of file serving solutions, announced the general availability of the PriceMaker Rating Grid.
The solution is based on RateIntegration’s PriceMaker Enterprise Pricing Server 8.0 and the IBRIX Fusion file serving solution. Benchmarks recently conducted at Yale University—using real-world rating and discounting scenarios used by Tier I service providers—yielded an observed aggregate throughput in excess of 1.1 million CDRs per second, or 4 billion events per hour. The product was loaded with over 2 billion CDRs, as well as 4 million subscribers and real-world “re-price” scenarios typically used for modeling new services or competitive analyses.
The entry-level solution includes 16 nodes that can process 350,000 CDRs per second. Advanced offerings can be scaled to support larger configurations for processing multiple millions of CDRs per second.
Partner Communications Places a Follow-on Order for ECtel
Partner Communications, operating in Israel under the Orange brand, has placed a follow-on order for ECtel’s revenue assurance solution RAP. The RAP platform facilitates cost-effective and proactive assurance of revenues and processes for wireline, wireless, next-generation IP, multimedia and IPTV. It enables operators and system integrators to implement system interfaces, define key performance indicators and add or update such indicators for revenue assurance.
Partner Communications provides GSM, GPRS, UMTS and HSDPA-based services to more than 2.6 million subscribers.
LHS, Alcatel-Lucent Launch Billing and Customer Care Solution
LHS and Alcatel-Lucent announced a fully integrated prepaid and postpaid convergent billing system for present and next-generation voice, data and multimedia services. Alcatel-Lucent will offer the solution to all of its existing customers and new customers. LHS is now its preferred supplier and will become a major component of its customer care and billing portfolio. Their most recent joint customer was Belarus mobile services provider BeST in Minsk, which integrated all components needed for provisioning, customer care and refilling prepaid telephone cards.
Convergys Expands Outsourcing to include Finance and Accounting
Convergys announced that it has expanded it outsourcing operations to include marketing, human resources, and finance and accounting. Convergys will leverage its traditional outsourcing infrastructures, personnel and process and enable companies to take advantage of operational downtime during off-hours. Natalie Galbato, senior director of back-office solutions, believes that companies using this offering will be able to save 30-50 percent of the costs to perform these services in a outsourced environment.
According to a 2006 study by Hackett Group, Fortune 500 companies will save approximately $58 billion annually by outsourcing back-office processing, predominantly to outsourcers with both onshore and offshore operations. “Of this $58 billion, a large percentage will involve general accounting processing,” says Galbato.
The enhancements include the integration of Xerox Global Services document and records management. “In a global environment, companies must digitize all documents, before transporting them for processing,” she says. Instead of Convergys building out this capability, it will leverage Xerox’s global infrastructure.
UPC Broadband Selects NetCracker
UPC, Europe’s largest cable operator, has selected NetCracker’s Service and Network Provisioning for network and service management across its eight-country footprint. UPC Broadband has approximately 10 million subscribers and provides video, broadband, and high-speed Internet access, VoIP and mobile telephony to residential and business customers.
UPC Broadband also will deploy NetCracker’s service assurance and service fulfillment modules, including Service and Resource Inventory.
Comments and feedback welcome, please email Jill Morgan at jmorgan@billingworld.com.
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