Kabira on the charge with new convergent platform

From the IQPC Next Gen OSS/BSS Summit this week in Tucson, Kabira Technologies launched its Kabira Convergent Charging application and backed it up with its history of Visa-proven scalability.

The charging application was designed to specifically address the telecom space and service providers’ concerns over time-to-market, flexibility, and scalability. It helps them charge for new data and voice services offered over 3G/4G wireless, FTTx/broadband, WiMAX, and networks.

“One hundred percent of Visa’s payments go through our transaction switch software. That’s 10% of the U.S. economy and a testament to our scalability,” said Dan Geiger, telecom markets director at Kabira. “And as long as we have been doing that for Visa, we have been doing it longer for telecom.”

The KCC supports IP Multimedia Subsystem architectures and uses a high-performance, high-availability, memory-resident architecture of its own. It can reliably charge for any combination of services in real-time or batch modes, including those that integrate convergent services with subscriber profile information.

Kabira says its tops in scalability, but also supports service-aware charging for data networks, convergent charging for wireless networks, and policy management and rules that coordinate service delivery and charging.

Kabira has been adopted by 70 organizations in 30 countries, including VISA, AT&T, France Telecom, Bank of America, Vodafone and Alcatel.

The need for finding ways of rating and charging in real time will become more immediate as service providers are forced to double and in some cases quadruple their capacity for transactions. Since last year, for example, Verizon has already doubled its short message service (SMS) traffic.

"We are seeing [requests for proposal] where [service providers] are looking to quadruple usage event provisioning capabilities over the next three to four years,” Geiger said.

Kabira is playing in a very crowded market. Several companies are currently touting converged charging platforms, including Ericsson, HP, Amdocs, Telcordia, Siemens, Openent, Alcatel-Lucent and Convergys. Geiger says not to worry.

“The way we differentiate is on performance and scale. If you are a provider looking to pull together many services and are concerned that current alternatives for charging won’t be able to grow with you, we have a great story for that,” Geiger said.

The KCC is a configurable transaction model with linear scale. Geiger said this means when you add a second box you get double the speed. A third box triples the speed.