Cartesian Partners with a Leading European OSS Provider to Deliver Best-of-Breed Solutions
A major European cable company has adopted an approach to meeting new mediation and revenue assurance challenges that serves to confirm the benefits of a joint solutions strategy now on offer from TMNG Global’s Cartesian subsidiary and their partner, a leading European independent OSS supplier.
Cartesian, along with supplying the widely deployed Ascertain® revenue assurance platform, is a leading provider of consulting and systems integration services in the telecommunications OSS marketplace. The OSS provider supplies its mediation platform directly to customers and also serves as the OEM supplier of the mediation component to back-office portfolios on offer from major telcom vendors such as Nokia Siemens Networks, IBM, Converse and others. Customers benefit not only from the intrinsic advantages of the individual platforms but also from Cartesian’s reputation for ensuring that no stone is left unturned when it comes to building the most robust framework for ever-changing back-office operations.
After finding themselves repeatedly teamed as winning bidders on various telecommunications companies’ OSS consolidation projects over the past few years, Cartesian and the OSS provider have taken steps to maximize the synergies between their market-leading mediation and revenue assurance solutions; while at the same time, greatly simplifying the vendor selection and platform integration processes for their customers. Now customers can proceed with their introductions of new services and multi-territory consolidations without incurring huge time penalties in full confidence that they are implementing the most powerful mediation and revenue assurance solutions in the market.
The European cable company’s decision to tap the joint offering from the two companies is an especially significant endorsement of the advantages inherent to this approach. While the MSO could have brought the mediation solution into play as part of an integrated OSS platform from its existing billing supplier, it chose to work with the provider in the context of the Cartesian partnership because it recognized the great benefits it would gain from having access to a robust revenue assurance platform and substantial OSS integration expertise as part of the mediation package.
The MSO’s Mediation Challenge
The MSO found itself in need of a new mediation system following significant growth of its voice business. The company, now serving several million customers, wanted to scale its internal infrastructure and needed a mediation system to support current and future growth targets.
As a first step, the MSO issued RFPs for a provisioning system that would meet the new service and market requirements. Once the supplier of the provisioning platform was selected, the company began the search for a mediation solution. Because Cartesian had been a long-time provider of systems integration support for the MSO, the company invited Cartesian to recommend a mediation solution as part of the RFP process.
Through several engagements where it helped service providers to select mediation and other elements in the OSS upgrade process, Cartesian had found that the OSS provider’s mediation system consistently outperformed other solutions, leading invariably to its selection by Cartesian’s clients. With this in mind, Cartesian made the mediation system part of a proposal that also incorporated Cartesian’s Ascertain® revenue assurance program as part of an integrated solution that went well beyond the threshold capabilities sought by the MSO.
Presented with several responses, the MSO chose Cartesian’s proposal in light of the compelling benefits that would accrue from using the mediation solution and Ascertain® to provide a world-class data integration platform with revenue assurance capabilities, strong system integration knowledge and domain expertise.
MSO Gains from Multiple Benefits
As Cartesian had anticipated, the mediation system’s flexible architecture, ease of deployment and simple-to-use management interface made the technology an obvious choice for the MSO’s mediation platform. The specific mediation technology, which replaced the legacy mediation system, will form a horizontal data integration layer across all the MSO’s network technologies, with initial usage focused on voice-related services. Now deployed in more than 110 telecommunications and cable networks worldwide, the platform can be used to support any combination of offline and online/active/bi-directional modes of mediation for voice, data and content services with carrier-grade functionality and flexibility.
Initially, while the MSO did not factor the need for a revenue assurance solution into its vendor selection process, company executives quickly realized how vital the types of functionalities provided by Ascertain® would be to the company’s bottom line as it aggressively expanded its subscriber base. By making the inclusion of revenue assurance a fundamental element of the design process, the MSO was able to exploit the cost-saving synergies between mediation and revenue assurance, both of which require a comprehensive view into the operational components of the OSS/BSS structure with a fundamental mindset that says “validate everything, trust nothing.”
The MSO’s leaders understood that the complexities of today’s telecommunications operations require a fully automated yet highly flexible approach to revenue assurance. This is especially true for an operation that serves several million subscribers.
Automation is essential to freeing up valuable staff time that would otherwise be spent on acquiring, manipulating and comparing data. Ascertain provides a comprehensive analytical framework to monitor all aspects of revenue operations, from creation of the chargeable records to their complete and timely delivery to their destination. It supports easy and cost-effective implementation of telco-specific revenue assurance processes that work seamlessly across network elements and core operational and business support systems.
The flexibility that’s required to meet constantly changing revenue assurance requirements depends in large part on how the platform is configured from the outset. This is a vital role played by Cartesian’s professional team that can be as important as the software itself.
Cartesian’s knowhow also helped the MSO to quickly move from its selection of vendors to configuring, testing and implementing the mediation and revenue assurance platforms – a process that took less than five months. The testing phase was greatly facilitated by Cartesian’s ability to employ its EDR Generator software to simulate call records and run them through mediation and revenue assurance processes as would be done in a live service environment. The system tests for accuracy in the application of mediation rules, filtering and guiding processes and all the procedures associated with applying prices and billing for usage. And it tests overall revenue assurance platform responsiveness to changes in the mediation and other policies.
With its long experience as an OSS/BSS systems integrator and consultant on major projects, Cartesian is well-positioned to bring a comprehensive, pre-integrated approach to mediation and revenue assurance to customers. These are solutions they can count on as best-of-breed responses to their requirements now and well into the future. The process that led to the European MSO’s choice of Cartesian and it mediation partner is sure to be replicated among other service providers in the months and years ahead.