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Frens Jan Rumph
Profile: I am a researcher, technical consultant and software engineer based in Holland. I have specialized in Charging, Accounting and Billing architectures. From both a technical point of view (IETF, 3GPP, etc) and a business point of view (TM Forum, GBA).
Main interests: Telecom, Charging, Accounting, Billing, Service Orientation, Software Architectures, Software Engineering
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Furthermore, this is a personal weblog, the opinions expressed here represent my own and not those of my employer.
HP and Amdocs claim IMS interoperability with legacy billing
Resulting from their joint efforts at the 4th IMS Forum’s plugfest, HP and Amdocs claim that they prove IMS interoperability with a Legacy Billing System.
The efforts by HP and Amdocs are indeed great steps that need to be taken in order for the IMS architecture to be successfully developed and brought to the industry. HP is even re-using this strategy toward other vendors as well. One of those vendors is Highdeal. They claim a ‘dramatic brakethrough’ in online charging. I do applaud these activities, as they strengthen the commercial viability of the IMS.
I do have some issues however with the claims. First of all, how legacy are the systems from Amdocs or Highdeal? It is claimed that Amdocs for instance communicates with HP through (at least some flavour) of diameter. Both products are top of the notch billing systems, and can hardly be called legacy!
Secondly, and even more important for me, is the question: what does this do to standardisation? I have raised the question earlier already in a previous post. This might make all the efforts put in the development of Online Charging System specifications useless. Is that a bad thing? I’m not sure, but one of the reasons for standardisation is to decrease vendor lock-in possibilities, so I’d say that this work should be continued. However if the industry is not adopting the standards… It would be nice to see HP, Amdocs, Highdeal and others to give back to 3GPP in the form of their protocols for communication towards rating and account balance management systems.
Source: HP and Amdocs claim (pdf)
Source: HP and Highdeal announcement
Frens Jan Rumph