TeleManagement Forum Executive Webinar Series:

How Real-time and Service-Aware Charging Delivers Revenue and Profitability

 

Originally broadcast: Thursday November 29, 2007

Click here to view the recorded webinar

Duration: 1 hour

 

Speakers

Ed Finegold, President and Chief Analyst, Stylus Telecommunications - Former Editor in Chief of Billing World and OSS Today Magazine, and Author of "Internet Infrastructure: The Ultimate Guide to OSS/BSS" from Kluwer Publishing

Paul Sutton, President and Chief Executive Officer, Kabira

 

Summary

Although average revenue per user (ARPU) has been declining, telecom providers are continuing to experience an explosion of new services and traffic. With cheap memory, unlimited connectivity and the move to 64-bit processing, providers are offering scores of diverse and attractive services to their customers.

But these innovative services and technologies are spawning a new set of operational challenges. The new services are themselves fueling exponential increases and “never before seen” complexity in transaction data. To best monetize these services and simultaneously maintain or improve their cost position, providers must find a way to manage massive amounts of service usage information much more efficiently. Failure to do so may result in the loss of key charging or provisioning data, which in turn causes revenue loss or competitive de-positioning, and ultimately, the inability to meet profit objectives.

It will also result in the following:

• ARPU is leveled off — customers will not pay any more per month for basic services.
• Service providers need to gain Next-Generation technology capability to have the ability to create and quickly launch new services to create new revenue streams.
• All providers have to scale to meet rapidly growing real-time and IP traffic volumes.
• Revenue per transaction is decreasing, and the number of charging events per transaction is increasing. Therefore, many more charging events must be processed while time costs must decrease to remain profitable.
• Siloed charging systems need to be consolidated to remain effective.
• Service aware charging becomes a critical capability for providers as they face competition from traditional and new market entrants such as online players.
• Current systems don’t scale effectively in this new business environment.

In this webinar, attendees will obtain unique insight into how some of the largest telecom companies in the world are addressing the challenges of time to market, customer acquisition and retention and improving cost performance. They will also gain perspective on how extreme transaction processing platform technologies can open up additional opportunities.

Learn how telecom will need to evolve as the industry experiences intense competitive pressures, and find out how leveraging key technologies can in fact open up new opportunities for telecommunications network and service providers.

 

Speaker Bios:

Edward Finegold is the former Editor in Chief of Billing World and OSS Today and author of "Internet Infrastructure: The Ultimate Guide to OSS" from Kluwer Publishing. Edward has worked in the OSS/BSS sector for more than 10 years as a consultant, analyst, business developer and publisher.

Currently he is an independent analyst and author, working with organizations including the TM Forum, and is co-authoring his second book with the CIO of a major US multi-service operator.

Paul Sutton has more than twenty-five years experience managing break-through software and technology companies. Paul has held positions in executive roles as well as in sales, marketing and technical management. He has grown Kabira to over 100 large customers in more than 30 countries, was the driving force that led the development of Kabira’s unparalleled 64-bit Kabira Transaction Platform and the revolutionary cross-network Kabira Transaction Switch, and won VISA, Motorola and Hitachi as strategic customers and partners. Before joining Kabira Technologies, Paul was vice president of sales and marketing at Intellicorp, a business modeling software company. Previously, he held positions as vice president of sales at Softlab, a computer-aided software engineering firm owned by BMW AG, and as managing director of Boole & Babbage, a system management software company.