I was thinking on current state of off-the-shelf billing products vis-a-vis plethora of innovative services Communication Service Providers (CSPs) are planning to bring to market. Few things came in mind.

First of all, we all understand that billing is critically important for any CSP. Majority of the times, bill is the only item with which CSP connects with a customer. Probably, nobody denies the importance of accurate and timely bill. We all also agree that sound customer interaction management strategy and tools are equally important and billing and customer management should move hand-in-hand most of the time.

Secondly, billing systems typically encompass a broad portfolio of activities, not just billing. They address customer acquisition, trouble ticketing, provisioning, pricing, credit control, payments, work force management, settlement etc. The implication of this is that substantial time, risk, investment and learning will be involved in operationalizing a new billing system.

Thirdly, CSPs all across the world are facing reduction in tariffs almost from all types of services. The only ways to increase revenue seems a. to acquire new customers (probably low value) b. to connect more with existing customers so that they don’t leave and use newer services. Differentiation through better QoS, though important, is not the main reason why a CSP succeeds. In contrast, overall quality of customer experience, of which QoS is a part, plays the major role.

Fourth, while innovation in networks is important, innovation in services/products using moderate network capability seems to work better for CSPs. Gradually, CSPs have started spending substantial money, sometimes more than that of acquiring network capability, in getting ready their billing and OSS systems to cater to new services. We all know that time is of essence in new service offering and billing along with provisioning plays a significant role.

Now, if you notice carefully all the above points and try to find critical billing capabilities that may enable CSP to run his business economically, chances are that you come up with ‘flexibility’ and ‘scalability’. If we reflect little on flexibility, we may understand the real issue. Most of the off-the-shelf billing products have provided flexibility based on their understanding of requirement of new services and business flows in the foreseeable future. So, where does the problem lie? The problem lies in the fact that future of services or business flows or customer experience requirements are not really known. This brings us to another question: How do you design a system without knowing the exact requirement?

Answer to this question lies in abstraction. Precisely – move to higher level of abstraction and do not hard wire functionalities based on current state of requirements. In technical terms, devise a language (at a level higher than 4GLs) and provide human friendly and compact syntax for domain concepts. Another important part of the answer is to model current requirements using the above mentioned abstraction. So, users remain happy now and ever!
If we assume billing is strategic (which I believe) and if we accept that flexibility and scalability are counted as ‘most important’, we need to think beyond currently available COTS. We, at Zinnia Systems, are committed to provide you BSS products (and services) with technical superiority and high usefulness. Have a good day.

-Chiranjib Bhandary