Convergys lands Leap, picks up VeriSign scraps

VeriSign reportedly has about a dozen customers on its billing platform, mostly tier 2 and tier 3 operators. The only large customer on the platform is MetroPCS. Most of those customers have already selected next-gen billing vendors (including MetroPCS, which chose Amdocs) and do not appear to represent new customer prospects for Convergys.

“Our intent is not to continue to operate and run that [VeriSign] platform long-term; our intent is to do this as a step toward helping Leap migrate,” said Tom Erskine, Convergys’s vice president of product marketing. “The vast majority of customers [on the VeriSign system] have already made migration plans [with other vendors]. The over-riding purpose is to ensure a smooth transition [for Leap].”

The new Convergys implementation will serve as the core of Leap/Cricket’s billing and customer care platform and will enable the operator to consolidate all customer account and transaction information into a single, converged platform. Cricket will also use the capabilities to enable service and billing convergence across its voice, high-speed data and content delivery services.

IDC’s Rainge questioned whether Leap – even with the move to the new Convergys billing platform, investment in which has “been notably weak in recent years,” she claimed – or other service providers are taking an appropriately strategic view of just how important their back-office systems truly are.

“Leap will get some improvements from working with Convergys, but it’s not going to bring them fully up to date. The Convergys technology is not cutting-edge; it's proven, but that's because of its age,” Rainge said. “The real issue shown here is that telecom service providers are continuing to build operational and business process systems based on weak solutions due to financial goals. Putting weak links into the business process chain for customer-facing systems is risky.”

To support the VeriSign billing platform, Convergys will take on between 100 and 200 VeriSign employees, Erskine said. He would not, however, give a timetable for how long the vendor would continue to have to support the VeriSign platform.