Telecommunications

February 7, 2007
Intec's growing presence in the telecom billing space

Sufia Tippu

BANGALORE -- One of the world's best-known telecoms billing firms, Intec is now making a big impact in the Indian telecom space. Although this UK-based telecom software and services provider, which supplies business and operations support systems (BSS/OSS) to over 400 of the world's largest carriers, including seven of the top ten, has been present in India since the turn of the century, it has recently embarked on a more aggressive route to become a leading player in the Indian telecom space.

Its solutions are designed to provide a complete billing solution to a service provider, for example, optimising a carrier's wholesale business processes or getting its end user billing system efficiently streamlined. Typically each solution comprises two or more Intec product and service components, pre-integrated and tested, with configuration specific to that business application.

Gary Bunney, COO at Intec who has over 25 years experience in the IT market with the last 15 years of this focused on the telecommunications market, is gung-ho about the Indian telecom landscape. Responsible for all of Intec's product management and development activities as well as Intec's worldwide services delivery, Bunney was in India recently talking to customers and firming up India plans. In an interview with Convergence Plus, he talks about how efficient BSS/OSS can help Indian telcos to get their billing processes on the right and cost effective track.

Convergence Plus: What is it that Intec provides?

Gary Bunney: We provide systems and services that automate the back office processes of telcos - mobile, wireless, broadband and cable.

Although Intec was founded in late 1997 to sell an interconnect billing system, which has evolved from a single product to a complete line of billing systems and services to become a market leader and innovator in the billing domain. Our business has grown right around the world, both organically and by acquisition.

We develop, implement and support Business and Operations Support Systems (BSS/OSS) for the majority of the world's largest communications providers, including leaders in fixed, mobile and next-generation networks (i.e. WLAN, 3G and IP). Our products range from billing, mediation, activation, rating and charging to powerful solutions for IPTV, mobile/MVNOs, VoIP and wholesale billing.

Our products address a specific business or technical requirement within a single functional domain, for example, interconnect billing or service activation. Each product will typically offer the full range of functionality required within a major carrier, MVNO/VNO or content/service provider. Our products are designed to work effectively together, and all have been deployed many times over in large-scale networks, both individually and with other Intec or third party products.

CP: You are the world's number one vendor in wholesale billing management. Can you explain what wholesale billing means and do you have any wholesale billing customers in India?

GB: There are two forms of telecoms billing. One, when a service provider such as Airtel or Hutch buys services and bandwidth from say, VSNL, this has to be accounted for with a bill. In India we have customers like Hutch and Tata/VSNL for our wholesale billing products.

The other form of billing is retail, for producing bills for end-users. It’s common for an existing telco to use perhaps 20 to30 different billing systems and we use our convergent billing product to consolidate these disparate systems. Today, competition is so intense and every telco wants to get its prices down. That is possible only if you can get the number of systems consolidated to a smaller number.

New services, new entrants, and new technologies are stimulating demand but driving down international wholesale margins. Profiting in such a dynamic marketplace requires the ability to acquire, analyse and act on the right information at the right time. Our experience working with carriers around the globe has resulted in an exciting new solution - the Intec Wholesale Business Management Solution - that can rapidly adapt to promote best business practices and increase margin in wholesale business. It provides contract management to support the process of traffic trading, routing management, from basic least cost routing (LCR) to highly advanced optimal routing, network management to automate programming of routes into complex networks and performance management to provide real-time traffic reporting and alerting.

It works across any service type and is also compliant with complex ITU-rules agreements. Apart from this, it can also easily integrate with Oracle or SAP financials.

CP: Your mobile business solution has evolved to become one of the world's best charging and billing solutions. What is it that it offers that is different from others?

GB: It offers start-up operators and MVNOs pre-integrated functionality to support all wireless services on one platform with a common subscriber database.

Basically it is a framework consisting of a set of specifically targeted options, each of which supports different combinations of services depending on the complexity required, from simple, circuit switched voice and messaging services all the way through to fully converged, IP-enabled content and commerce services.

Its architecture is based on our products, which have been in the field for several years, with continual improvement, and it is now in use at major operators and MVNOs worldwide. The best part of this is that it can be rapidly deployed and is extremely cost effective. By deploying our business solution, operators and MVNOs can deliver an enhanced service experience; create customer loyalty, and most important get additional revenue. Because the solution is pre-integrated and globally supported by Intec, you can be sure of fast time to market, at lower cost than with other solutions.

CP: Over 150 carriers are using your carrier access billing solution. What exactly does it do?

GB: For many US operators, carrier access billing system (CABS) revenues represent a critical component of their top-line - recovering some of the cost of providing the local loop can mark the difference between a viable operation and bankruptcy. More than 150 carriers rely on Intec to maximise their results in collecting earned revenues. Its revenue assurance, dispute tracking, and state-of-the-art reporting capabilities provide the carrier-grade functionality that operators of all sizes require to fully capitalise on their network usage. Capable of processing reciprocal and wireless inter-carrier settlements, Intec CABS delivers flexibility, ease of use, and cost-effective system maintenance given its modern architecture.

CP: Does Intec offer professional services too?

GB: Our professional services are an essential part of any product or solution we offer, allowing our technology to be correctly specified, configured, implemented and supported to meet our customers' needs - wherever they are.

They include consulting and implementation, configuration and scripting, optimisation and tuning, education and training and global support. They are delivered by around 1,000-plus trained professionals, based close to our customers in 30 offices around the world. Our long-term policy is to ensure customer satisfaction and close relationships by placing staff in the most effective locations.

CP: And, part of this is implementation services?

GB: Yes, we have over 60 percent of the world's top 100 operators as customers, as well as several hundred other customers of all sizes, using our technology in over 80 countries. We have over 500 in-production installations of Intec products and solutions, with many customers having chosen multiple additional Intec products after their initial purchase.

We believe that this demonstrates not only the strength of our technology, but perhaps more importantly our ability to work closely with customers to use it to implement reliable, high-performance systems that deliver genuine return on investment - higher revenues, lower costs, increased customer satisfaction and market competitiveness.

CP: Hosted or outsourced solutions and services are a popular alternative for service providers who prefer to focus on their core business while outsourcing quality software and customer satisfaction. What is it that you offer in this space?

GB: We have been providing outsourced services for more than a decade to all sectors of the telecom market, including MSOs (cable), wireline and wireless, and to all sizes, from Tier 1 to Tier 3. Nearly 200 providers rely on Intec Outsourced Services to streamline their operations and minimise their costs. We offer the following outsourced services offerings for North America -- carrier access billing, which enables operators to recover the cost of providing local loop access to other carriers and maximise results in collecting earned revenues), end user billing (accounting for service usage and creating accurate bills is paramount to competitive success), BPO (five outsourced services that can be used individually or in combination to strategically meet the organisation's needs to achieve cost reduction while improving quality of service).

CP: So, Intec end user billing also comes under the outsourcing services purview?

GB: Yes. Our systems and facilities perform and process hundreds of thousands of bills each month for dozens of carriers with operations ranging from national to local service provider. Our end user billing solution offers the full range of functionality required to support a major carrier, MVNO/VNO or content/service provider. So whether you are a new operator or MVNO looking for a state-of-the-art billing system, an established player moving into next-generation services, or a service provider with multiple systems that you want to converge towards a single, high-performance system, outsourcing your billing may be an optimal approach for executing your business strategy. And we are the world leader in this space.

CP: You have also been bitten by the BPO bug and have started offering BPO services under the umbrella of hosted services. Could you give us your take on that?

GB: Outsourcing is an increasingly attractive solution to one of the telecom industry's most pressing problems-maintaining high-quality customer communications while controlling costs. With the challenges associated with the deployment of new services and technologies to combat churn and boost margins, providers can ill afford the diversion of time and resources to non-core, albeit critical, business processes. Our BPO offering is a highly customised service combining IT and process outsourcing to address day-to-day business functions with minimal capital investment.

We offer five outsourced service offerings that can be used individually or in combination to strategically meet the needs of telcos to achieve cost reduction while improving quality of service. They are remittance processing (which offers both electronic and paper processing services for all the tasks necessary to effectively capture and apply payments), contact center (where phone, e-mail, written correspondence, and web communications converge to deliver great customer relationship management), print and mail (simple, low-cost solution for the printing and mailing of invoices, statements and other vital business communications, fulfillment (outsourcing of large, small, or temporary fulfillment tasks so that expenses are reduced) and back office operations (services customised to meet the needs and standards our customers such as segment management, transition services, and on-demand operations).

CP: How are you able to design systems that help you get quickly to market, to react to marketplace changes, and to defeat competitive threats?

GB: Our BSS/OSS systems are designed using sophisticated configuration capabilities that allow you to quickly and securely introduce innovative products, support new network infrastructure, and deliver complex, bundled services and tariffs. We use advanced, client/server architectures with attractive and easy-to-use graphical user interfaces (GUIs) that allow rapid changes to system configuration, typically with a business rules-driven approach. We also offer some systems with a script-driven approach where this is preferred for highly-complex scenarios.

Many customers use these configuration and scripting capabilities themselves, and we naturally offer full training and support in these tools. But many other customers also choose to work with Intec's expert professional services staff on configuration and scripting projects because this approach has many advantages, including expert knowledge of Intec technology, full exploitation of product functionality, best practices awareness, extensive library of re-usable components, wide, practical knowledge of industry issues and most important of all -- ongoing, global support and education, and knowledge transfer.