March 2010 

 

Our industry is rapidly evolving on a number of fronts, particularly when it comes to the management of customer life changing services. Communications Service Providers (CSPs) are working to bring advanced business and pricing models to market in an effort to keep pace with competitive offers and to deliver more consistent customer value. Such change in business strategy requires new functions within Business Support (BSS) and Operations Support (OSS) systems. It also means modification to the business processes defining how services are sold, provisioned, managed and billed.

 

These services have placed challenges on the billing functions, service fulfillment, and service assurance domains. But there is still more.With the proliferation of new service capabilities, enabled especially by the evolution of network and user devices, comes the exponential increase in data generation by customers using both mobile and fixed-line services. Such increases are now a significant influencer for what has evolved into the “core triumvirate” of real time business support need: billing system upgrades to address real-time rating & charging; policy management tied to customer-defined service options, business definition, and technology operability; and usage data collection (especially IP-based deep packet collection) to understand customer service uptake and for policy enforcement.

 

This paper defines the BSS challenges involving management of the flow of customer usage transactions. It outlines the basic features a policy management solution should address, and how it ties with the rating & charging and data discovery functions. It also explains how one supplier—Volubill—is working to meet this real-time business challenge.