Telcos must seriously look at interoperability of the products that they buy. Other equally critical aspects are scalability and performance of the products, credibility of the vendor, financial stability of the vendor, support infrastructure of the vendor etc. While investing in these products, telcos must carefully study and document their real requirements and assess the products against these requirements. Extensive vendor and product evaluation, complete with reference checks and site visits, must be instituted. OSS/BSS products must be procured to bring a differentiation with competitors, to sweat the network elements further, among other things. More specifically, telcos should evaluate solutions against the following parameters:

• Ability to Address Problems: Today, telecommunications operators must do more with less. Despite drastically reduced budgets, they must continue to deliver new services, build customer loyalty and improve operational efficiencies. They must find ways to incrementally increase their profits while also keeping churn rates at bay.

In order to ensure that operators maximize revenues in the current climate, vendors must simply, transparently and seamlessly address the complexities of today’s emerging business models as well as the business models of the future.

• Vendor’s Responsiveness: One of the most important attributes of a billing solution is to be agile when responding to new and changing requirements. Persistent innovation and rapid time-to-market have always been major challenges. It is important for the billing solution provider to be very closely tied to the service provider, to understand their current and future requirements clearly, including any regional implications. Perhaps to the extent of having a say in planning of services and guiding the service provider towards future services.

• Best-of-suite Solutions: The Yankee Group says that the best-of-breed software products are being replaced by best-of-suite applications in the complementary BSS and OSS areas. By providing a common architectural framework that requires little up-front work or investment to tie the billing and customer care systems together, operators can lower operational costs while having the ability to handle a wide range of tasks—from providing customer support to billing the customer to generating new revenues. This is one dominant trend where operators want to be assured of the depth of functionality and breadth of options and at the same time ensure ease of integration and interface to third-party systems. So operators should look for integrated ordering and customer management, billing and balance management, and revenue enablement coupled with an extendible and flexible architecture.

• ntegrated Approach: The platform should seamlessly link three main solution sets together.

Customer management solutions—Front-end customer care applications should be visible within the platform that focuses on increasing customer satisfaction and retention as well as the value of each customer.

Billing engine—At the core of the framework should reside a billing engine that’s able to rate and bill for any service offered in the telecommunications industry.

Revenue enablement—In order for providers to capture revenue streams from evolving next-generation services, they must be able to manage complex multi-party content and partner agreements as well as provide a single view of the customer to deliver quality service.

Connecting these three pieces with the overarching framework brings together the power of the platform. Placing the business logic directly into the framework allows for easy and low-risk integration when adding new solutions to the platform. As such, billing and customer care vendors can take the initiative to step up into the service providers’ enterprise so that the enterprise doesn’t have to step down to them. Providing a clear, single view of the customer—from the billing to customer care perspective—service providers have the advantage to speak to their customer in the language they demand.

l Differential Billing: While there is an imminent need of a robust and scalable rating engine, this has to be thought through very carefully as the ratio of prepaid to postpaid subscribers is quite disproportionate (70:30). Clearly there is a requirement of a differential billing platform and there are innovative solutions from various vendors to cater to this. Other than the rating engine this solution will also require probes for the IP network as well as mediation system.

l The Currency of Content: Content has created a new value chain where content providers, advertisers, clearing houses and network operators all play a role and retain a portion of a single transaction value. As such, a new business model has emerged where the simple one-to-one operator-to-customer relationship is now a many-to-many relationship. The business model that was based solely on profitably processing customer contracts involving relatively static portfolio tariffs and discounts has been replaced. Business now demands the management of complex multi-party partner agreements with dynamic and partner tailored agreements.

A business solution is needed which can manage these agreements and settlements with the appropriate parties. This emerging business model finds network operators responsible for the distribution of the shared revenue to partners from a content event that occurred using its network.

Network operators are partnering with content providers, content aggregators and portals. The portal is most often responsible for creating and managing the agreements with the content providers while the network operator manages the settlements system. If operators do not initiate partnerships and arrange revenue-share agreements with content providers, operators could get cut out of the revenue loop. Managing the end-to-end agreements with all parties is key to the operator’s success.

l Electronic Bill Presentment & Payment (EBPP) and Self Care: Two major business drivers are seen to be the key towards an increased demand for EBPP and self care systems—the continuous challenge to reduce operational cost, and the market shift toward electronic lifestyle. EBPP and self care enable operators to reduce cost of operations in generating paper bill and delivery of paper bill, in routing more customers away from the call center into web-based customer self care also improving the revenue collection. The rise of the electronic or digital generation also meant the shift towards self care will put great convenience and control into the hands of these customers as well as increase quality of customer service.

l Dynamic Balance Management: Dynamic balances as opposed to monthly bill will become the order of the day instead of monthly bills. For example a subscriber may have a credit balance on their mobile voice charges through an external loyalty scheme, which could be offset by the debit on their mobile data charges. Operators are known today to facilitate micro payments but there is a huge opportunity for operators to capture the revenue pool via facilitating macro-payments as well.

l Focus on Prepaid Data and Prepaid Content: In most Asian Countries the growth of prepaid subscribers has outgrown that of postpaid systems. The prepaid sector is a very lucrative and powerful segment that cannot be ignored. The ability of operators to be able to extend data and content services to prepaid customer and capture those revenue would be critical.