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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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Lifetree Convergence missing the point
I just read an article on billingworld.com about how Lifetree Convergence uses McObject’s eXtremeDB for real-time rating and credit control. On one hand interesting, for me as an engineer at least, on the other hand completely missing the point!
My two cents…
Cent 1: Added value
While speed is ofcourse a (not unimportant) requirement for a real-time rating and credit control application, it’s not going to win you the war. Adding customer value just might, and a credit control request rated within 2 milliseconds or within 20 milliseconds just might not be perceived as value by the customer.
Cent 2: Service Orientation
When checking out their website I noticed the following remark: ‘@Billity’s powerful functionality comes in a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). This provides you a framework to integrate existing, legacy applications on to a single platform.’ This sounds good of course, SOA is a great buzz word (yes, it still is). However I’ve not seen ANYthing that leads me to thing that it has any caracteristics of being service oriented. Just to be complete, the service oriented design principles as described by Erl:
- Service Loose Coupling
- Service Abstraction
- Service Reusability
- Service Autonomy
- Service Statelessness
- Service Discoverability
- Service Composability
- Standardized Service Contract
I think that the combination of SOA and charging/billing presents some great opportunities, in terms of business agility, time-to-market and total cost of ownership. But there are also some hurdles to be taken. One of those is performance. Some billing implementations have to process millions of CDR’s per hour, but the most commonly used SOA enabling techologies (SOAP/XML webservices) are probably not going to ‘cut it’. Especially if you consider that some charging/billing processes would involve a lot of service invocations.
I wonder if any vender will ever pick up on this by itself, the benifit for them might just not be big enough…
Frens Jan Rumph
June 3rd, 2008 at 8:56 am
Hi Frens,
I came across your post while surfing. I am employed with Lifetree Convergence Ltd and am familiar with both the products and would like to add my comments to your post.
cent 1: Added Value
As far as our Product J@nus is concerned, speed is not the most important attribute but is incidental (though the product has achieved an enviable level of performance). The unique attribute of J@nus is true convergence across subscriber base (prepaid,post-paid & mixed-mode) and across services (voice,messaging,data, content over GSM/CMDA/Fixed Line/IP).
Having said that, in a Real-Time rating & balance control system the speed of processing provides faster call setup times, higher service levels to the operator, and effective use of available resources. Yes ‘Speed does matter with Size’ of subscriber base. With large subscriber bases, the speed and efficiency of the product does help the operator to keep the TCO low and achive a faster ROI.
Cent 2: Service Orientation
@Billity is a Billing and Customer Care system with a design based on the eTOM model. The business processes as depicted on the eTom framework are available as services on the enterprise service bus.
The SOA architecture of @Billity has provided us agililty in terms of rapid deployment, integration with third party applications and definitely better TCO.
Just to add the last cent … a combination of J@nus and @Billity provides unique levels of sophistication in terms of functionality, performance, innovative
services at a very low TCO covering the entire subscriber base of a telco.
Regards,
Dinabandhu
June 3rd, 2008 at 11:43 am
Dear Dinabandhu Mitra,
First of all, thank you for your comment! As for the added value: you are correct, a lower TCO and faster ROI is a good thing! I agree with you on that. I am however not sure if that’s going to ‘win the war’ for an operator, so to speak. I doubt if operational excellence will guarantee the viability of an operators business in the long run. So adding value in terms of interesting services to the customer might be a bit more important… As for the service orientation remark: good to hear that @billity is connectable to an ESB. However I’m still not completely convinced whether that would implicate support of the characteristics of service oriented design according to Erl.
Finally, again thanks for your comment! It hits the point a lot better then the article on billingworld.com about which database vendor is under the hood!