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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
Disclaimer: All data and information provided on this site is for informational purposes only.
I do not make any representations as to accuracy, completeness, currentness, suitability, or validity of any information on this site and will not be liable for any errors, omissions, or delays in this information or any losses, injuries, or damages arising from its display or use. All information is provided on an as-is basis.
Furthermore, this is a personal weblog, the opinions expressed here represent my own and not those of my employer.
BIMS 2008 World BSS Awards
The BIMS 2008 World BSS Awards were announced Tuesday 10th of June, and are as follows:
Overall – Best Contribution to BSS
2008: LHS
2007: Amdocs & Orga Systems
2006: LHS
Judges’ Award: ‘Above And Beyond The Call Of Duty’
2008: Nawras
2007: BSNL
Innovation In Billing & Information Management
2008: Highdeal
2007: Progress Software
2006: Highdeal
Best Billing / Charging Implementation
2008: NTT DoCoMo
2007: Vodafone UK /Flexphone
2006: BT Mobile / Martin Dawes Systems
Best Content / Partner Management Implementation
2008: No nominations carried forward
2007: Interia PDTM / Comarch
2006: MTN South Africa and Echostar / MetraTech (Co-Winners)
Best e/m-Commerce / Payments / Collections Implementation
2008: Maxis/paybox & Garanti Bank
Best Revenue Assurance / Management Project
2008: BT / cVidya
2007: BT
2006: Allround/Magyar Telekom
Best Customer Management / Business Intelligence / Marketing Project
2008: No nominations carried forward
2007: Mobilink
2006 -Thuraya Satellite Telecommunications
This years Judges:
Anil Prakash – President, Telecom Users Group of India
Barbara Lancaster – President, LTC International
Chris Sanders – Partner, Business Change Partners
Hugh Roberts (Chair) – Consultant Director, BSS/OSS RM Events, IIR Telecoms &
Senior Strategist – Patni Telecoms Consulting
Olga Botero – CIO, Bancolombia
Peter Smith – Director of Information Technology, Hong Kong CSL
Teresa Cottam – Principal Telecoms Analyst, Analysys
Frens Jan Rumph
Building Marketplaces with Managed Syndicated Services
The TM Forum’s catalyst project ‘Building Marketplaces with Managed Syndicated Services‘ presented its results at Management World 2008 in Nice. The project aims to implement standards-based B/OSS for cross-platform next generation service management’.
The project is sponsored by BT, Microsoft and Telefonica. Further contributions are made by Accenture, CA, Iptivia, Netcracker and Tribold.
The idea of the project is to create a service delivery concept which reassembles SOA service repositories. A service provider exposes a number of services that can be syndicated by a party that combines the services into a new service for the end-user. These syndicated services could be voice or any other multimedia communication services, content services, et cetera.
The project gives the following example, it neatly shows how a service supply chain can be instantiated by syndicating a number of loosely-coupled services:
- A conferencing service is exposed by Service Provider A to be syndicated under three contracts: small, medium and large conference
- A real time video session delivery is exposed by Service Provider B to be syndicated under two contracts: slideware presentation and animated presentation
- A common billing service is exposed by Service Provider C to be syndicated under one contract: detailed charging
- A service aggregator will contract an animated video presentation for a small conference with detailed charging. The service aggregator has the capability to capture events/information related to the health and usage of services provided by SP A and SP B before using SP C for invoicing the end user.”
Phase I of the catalyst project demonstrated the end-to-end product assembly, provisioning and service quality management capabilities ready for service syndication. The next phase, scheduled for the second half of 2008, will include settlements, billing and revenue allocation.
It sounds like a very interesting project; especially the second phase is of particular interest for me personally. I have done some research on similar problems from a charging and billing perspective already in the Ambient Networks project and more recently in an in-house research project within my company. Some of these results have landed in a paper called ‘Accounting, Charging and Billing for Dynamic Service Composition Chains’ which is currently under review for the 17th International Conference on Information Systems Development. This paper gives some views on the changes required on Accounting, Charging and Billing processes and enabling systems in order for them to support service composition similar to the service syndication concept presented in this TM Forum catalyst project.
This project is definitely on my watch list!
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
Openet launches two new products
Openet has launched two new products at Management World 2008, based on their FusionWorks platform. The first product is Policy Manager, the second Balance Manager.
A couple of things:
1) I’m getting more and more interested in their FusionWorks Framework. I’ve never had the chance to work with it, but perhaps in the future.
2) I’m not sure what the Policy Manager is policing. It’s all very flexible and on a per subscriber basis etcetera, but what does it police?
3) Does the Policy Manager implement 3GPP’s Policy & Charging Control architecture (3GPP TS 23.203)?
4) If the Balance Manager supports IETF diameter, the please support the standardisation process done by 3GPP! This will probably help the entire industry!
Link: announcement at billingworld.com
Link: Openet’s Policy Manager product page
Link: Openet’s Balance Manager product page
Frens Jan Rumph
BIMS 2008 - World BSS awards finalists
The judges for the World BSS awards of the BIMS 2008 conference have announced the finalists. Please note the lack of finalists in two categories!
I hope that the lack of finalists in the categories ‘Best Content / Partner Management Implementation’ and ‘Best Customer Management / Business Intelligence / Marketing Project’ is only due to a lack of proposals from the industry. Since these categories (in my view) contain a lot of opportunities for innovation, as well as challenges to overcome.
I must say that I get an increasingly desire to know the rationale for these types of award show nominees. Especially in the innovations category: what are these great new innovations? I wonder if all of the nominees in that categorie have even released a new product or version of a product. But perhaps that’s not the right criterion.
BTW: notice that Oracle and its Communications Billing and Revenue Management (a.k.a. Portal Infranet) is not on any list!
The finalists are:
1. Overall - Best Contribution to BSS
- Amdocs
- Comverse
- Intec Systems
- LHS
- MetraTech
- Orga Systems
- In addition, the Judges decided to give an Honourable Mention to AsiaInfo
2. Judges’ Award: ‘Above And Beyond The Call Of Duty’
- kajeet / Telcordia
- Nawras
- SFR / Capgemini
- Virgin Media / TMNG Global
3. Innovation In Billing & Information Management
- Garanti Technology
- Highdeal
- kajeet / Telcordia
- LHS
- MetraTech
- Orga Systems
4. Best Billing / Charging Implementation
- Astelit life / Orga Systems
- City Of Chicago / MetraTech
- du / LHS
- NTT DoCoMo
- Utel / Comverse
- In addition, the Judges decided to give an Honourable Mention to Opal / CTI Group
5. Best Content / Partner Management Implementation
- The Judges decided not to carry any nominations forward as Finalists in this category.
6. Best e/m-Commerce / Payments / Collections Implementation
- Garanti Bank
- Maxis / paybox
- QQ Coin
- VimpelCom / Kabira
7. Best Revenue Assurance / Management Project
- AT&T / ECtel
- BT / cVidya Networks
- Carphone Warehouse
- Etisalat Egypt / Connectiva Systems
8. Best Customer Management / Business Intelligence / Marketing Project
- The Judges decided not to carry any nominations forward as Finalists in this category. However, they did decide to give an Honourable Mention to George Kohl
The judges are:
Hugh Roberts (Chair) - Consultant Director, BSS/OSS RM Events, IIR Telecoms & Senior Strategist, Patni Telecoms Consulting
Anil Prakash - President, Telecom User Group Of India
Barbara Lancaster - President, LTC International
Chris Sanders - Partner, Business Change Partners
Olga Botero - CIO, Bancolombia
Peter Smith - Director of Information Technology, Hong Kong CSL
Teresa Cottam - Prinicipal Teldcoms Analyst, Analysys Mason
Frens Jan Rumph