Tecnotree Agility Wholesale Billing

Transcription

1 Tecnotree Agility Wholesale Billing Product Overview Powering the Digital Marketplace Tecnotree Corporation P.O. Box 93, (Finnoonniitynkuja 7) FIN Espoo, Finland tel , fax

2 Tecnotree is a global provider of telecom IT solutions for the management of products, customers and revenue. Tecnotree helps communications service providers to transform their business towards a marketplace of digital services. Tecnotree empowers service providers to monetise on service bundles, provide personalised user experiences and augment value throughout the customer lifecycle. With over 1100 telecom experts, Tecnotree serves more than 100 service providers in over 70 countries. Tecnotree is listed on the main list of NASDAQ OMX Helsinki with the trading code TEM1V. Tecnotree Agility TM Suite Tecnotree Agility Suite offers a full complement of products and solutions needed to transform communications service provider s business towards a marketplace of digital services. The natively convergent suite architecture supports all stages of the value chain; service creation, offer bundling, monetisation, and end-to-end customer lifecycle management. Well defined interfaces between the suite components enable deployment of integrated systems all at once, or in phases as standalone products. Tecnotree Agility Suite offers unmatched value and flexibility to Communications Service Providers (CSPs) around the world. Its proven components are serving hundreds of millions of subscribers every day. Service creation Offer bundling Lifecycle management Monetisation

3 Today s Environment With the increase in competition within the telecom industry, as well as new threats from the outside, CSPs are today faced with the twin challenges of increasing their revenue while at the same time cutting down on cost. While the latter typically involves much operational optimisation, the former calls for a new approach to service innovation and customer retention. Trade pundits have long been claiming that the voice business is dead. While technological advances have provided some alternatives to customers who now use Skype and Google Voice as an alternate to make voice calls, revenue from voice services have flattened, and are bound to go down further. As a major stakeholder to this channel used for these Over The Top (OTT) services, CSPs are ideally positioned to decide how their infrastructure should best be monetised. OTT companies such as Facebook, Skype and other providers of web 2.0 applications have multimillion-dollar revenues, however little or none of this currently benefits the CSP. Another significant change affecting the CSP revenue stream is the rapidly growing base of connected devices. Currently there are an estimated 9 billion devices connected to networks worldwide and research indicates that this will only increase exponentially. This growth will also be fuelled by non-conventional devices such as utility meters, vehicles, household electronics and M2M in general. In order to capture the opportunities on offer, the CSPs have to transform to a smart pipe. They may do this either by competing with the OTT service providers by providing their own brand of services or by partnering with these OTT service providers. Both of these models come with their own advantages as well as pitfalls. While being a provider of a vast array of end-user services may give the CSP a complete control over the business, it may lack core competencies required to run the business. Partnering with these service providers, on the other hand, will be beneficial as these providers will have the innovation and vision essential for success in this market. In the latter case the CSP will have little control over the services so a true partnership approach is required to ensure a win-win scenario. A wide array of services requires the CSP to have different revenue models for different types of services. In order to provide the required flexibility, they need to have the right infrastructure which is extremely flexible to meet the customer demand for new types of subscription models such as personalised packages, while an efficient billing and settlement system helps cutting down on any revenue leakages across the board. To this effect, interconnect in telecommunication parlance traditionally has been limited to settlements between CSPs while a dedicated settlement system has been in place for service partner arrangements. This worked extremely well in the past with CSPs acting as a provider of voice and data services only. But now with the emergence of these new media technologies, partner settlements are in for a major overhaul. Connections (billions) Utility Security Automotive and transport Healthcare Government, retail and financial services figure 1: M2M device connection by segment, worldwide, source: Analysys Mason, 2011

4 How Equipped Are The Operators? All the previously mentioned seems to indicate that the definition of interconnect and settlement needs to be extended from just inter-csp services to include various service providers, resellers, banks, payment gateways and surely even advertisers. However, the basic tenets of partner management, be it interconnect, roaming or third party services, remains the same; management of contracts/agreements, charging for services and presenting an invoice. The typical partner management system of today falls short of the new requirements by handling interconnect and roaming partners in a standardised and mature manner as they were designed with only one kind of service in mind. When it comes to the full partner services offering, there are many more considerations at play. In addition to CRM and billing, there could also be value added services management systems, e-commerce platforms as well as content management systems taking on some of the functions. Unless the business processes and the integration frameworks are carefully considered right at the beginning, this would lead to individual departments within the organisation to work as silos, acting on an ad hoc basis. This could easily lead to tremendous partner dissatisfaction, sending lucrative, revenue generating partners to seek other alternatives for service monetisation. As the number of partners offering services is set to grow, so is the amount of services these partners will offer. The partner management system should be designed to handle relationships and pricing models which were not conceivable in a traditional content or voice only scenario. In the case where multiple sources of content and other services have been bundled into a package, based on the ever changing demands of their subscribers, multi-party settlements are almost a given. The same flexibility would be required in the case of agreements and revenue share models with these partners. This requires the Business Support Systems to easily integrate with the partner management system to allow a seamless flow of information. Analytical tools are also needed to constantly monitor and analyse the performance of the service so as to evaluate the partner s contribution to a CSP s business. At the partner end, the increasing amount of partner selfcare available, with dashboards and analytical tools, enables partners to manage the end-to-end lifecycle of their service, complete with the consumption patterns and other such metrics. Self-care also allows to provide proactive support to the partners, including effective and timely resolution of any eventual disputes. What is required to avoid this scenario is a centralised and automated system to handle revenue sharing, discounting and multiparty settlement as smoothly as possible. The underlying technology needs to be flexible and able to integrate easily with existing Business Support Systems (BSS) (product catalogue, order fulfilment, etc.) and the Service Delivery Platform. This is dictated by the fact that one system alone will not be able to manage the complete lifecycle of a service and its provider. Other systems such as CRM, product catalogue etc also play a role in the lifecycle and should complement the partner management system in a seamless way. Interconnect Roaming Wholesale MVNO CSP Music Video Games Advertisers figure 2: Partnerships

5 How We Can Help Tecnotree Agility TM Wholesale Billing is a comprehensive solution meeting all the previously mentioned requirements for partner management for interconnect, roaming and content partners in a single, integrated solution. The Tecnotree Agility TM Wholesale Billing solution provides a single repository with all the information regarding partners such as agreements, contracts, tariff information etc which can be easily accessible to any and all CSP functions, reducing duplication and thus resulting in improved operational efficiency and reduced time to handle errors. Tecnotree Agility Wholesale Billing has an integrated rating engine that is capable of splitting a single event generated by the network for multiple settlements. Tariffs for network events can be flexibly configured to be e.g. unit based, tier based or slab based. It also supports flexible volume discount schemes based on the total partner service usage in the CSP s network. The settlement module within Tecnotree Agility Wholesale Billing allows flexible configuration of invoicing periods for various partners. Charges payable to the respective partners are individually calculated for the invoice period and statements are generated for the payable charges, which help in reconciling with invoices sent by partners. Receivables are also automatically calculated for the invoice period for each partner. Detailed statements showing the day-by-day break-up of usage charges can be generated to be sent along with the invoices. The roaming module of Tecnotree Agility TM Wholesale Billing is in compliance to the standards laid down by GSMA for international roaming and supports features like TAP- IN, TAPOUT, RAP, HUR, NRTRDE. The various components which constitute the Tecnotree Agility TM Wholesale Billing solutions are illustrated below. Tecnotree Agility TM Wholesale Billing product modules PARTNER MANAGEMENT GSM ROAMING AGREEMENT AND TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT WHOLESALE BILLING ANALYTICS AND REPORTS RATING PARTNER SETTLEMENTS figure 3: Tecnotree Agility TM Wholesale Billing product modules

6 In a Nutshell Tecnotree Agility TM Wholesale Billing provides a single repository with all the information regarding partners which is easily accessible to all CSP functions, resulting in improved operational efficiency and reduced time to handle errors. Key benefits Key features 1. Centralise access to partner data 2. Ease of operation 3. Maximise revenue and increase productivity via efficient operations 1. Centralise operations for all partner management activities 2. Multi-dimensional agreements 3. Advanced revenue sharing models 4. Low total cost of ownership 5. Comply to GSM roaming standards 4. Unified rating engine for interconnect, roaming and content 5. Partner settlements for all lines of businesses interconnect, roaming, content, MVNOs and wholesale Tecnotree Agility TM Wholesale Billing is a comprehensive solution that meets all the requirements for partner management in a simple, integrated way.