Amdocs introduces real-time charging solution

MANILA, Philippines - A new packaged software and hardware offering for online charging will enable a quick, phased approach to monetize and centralize network services, leading customer experience systems and services provider Amdocs has announced.

This new offering is being seen as not only advantageous to service network providers but also essential to meeting consumer demand for service convergence.

Known as Amdocs Charging Smart Start, this new offering allows service providers to rapidly deploy real-time charging capabilities into the network, initially targeting prepaid or data monetization.

They can then easily extend the offering with additional charging capabilities to ensure a safe, cost-efficient path to fully convergent charging operations — essential to effectively address the growing consumer demand for real-time services on any device, across any network.

“Focus on cost control is driving some service providers to establish convergent charging capabilities in a phased manner,” said Justin van der Lande, revenue management program head at Analysys Mason.

“Often the initial phase of an installation needs to be quickly implemented. Having a preconfigured solution helps deliver this, but it must then be easy to extend to support additional charging capabilities. In particular, service providers who deploy prepaid charging systems need to ensure they are able to easily migrate their postpaid customers on to the same system. Amdocs Charging Smart Start supports this type of approach,” he added.

“Service providers are under increasing pressure to quickly monetize network investments,” said Rebecca Prudhomme, vice president for product and solutions marketing at Amdocs.

“Deploying Amdocs Charging Smart Start will allow for quick time-to-revenue from prepaid or data offerings. Moreover, the offering guarantees a smart evolution to convergent charging since it is designed to be easily extended with additional capabilities delivered by the comprehensive Amdocs Omni Convergent Charging Solution, and broader, pre-integrated Amdocs CES 9,” she said.

The new offering is based on Amdocs’ innovative, real-time charging technology — Amdocs Turbo Charging — which enables best-in-class, real-time charging performance.

The Linux-based charging software is pre-installed on low-cost, commodity hardware and includes built-in network and business support systems (BSS) interfaces.

Amdocs Charging Smart Start is fully 3 GPP R11 compliant, allowing for rapid integration with any network equipment vendor and can be deployed and ready for acceptance testing in just four months.

For more information, visit Amdocs at www.amdocs.com.