Billing's new buzzword: mediation

Everybody is doing it, but why?

Mediation is not new. It's as old as telecom itself. The term simply has not been part of modern marketing lingo. But judging from the turnout at a roundtable discussion at TeleStrategies' Billing 2000 show in Washington last month, billing mediation is getting some well-deserved attention.

Mediation is the act of collecting and sorting call data from a point of origin - which historically has been the switch - and feeding it into the billing system. But the shift to packet-based and distributed networks is changing the technology behind billing mediation solutions.

Packet networks increasingly carry content-based traffic. Mediation of content-based services helps put collected data into a measurable format from which it can be priced and billed, said Keith Worfolk, manager of communications and content consulting for KPMG.

Dana Kreitter, marketing manager for Smart Internet Usage at Hewlett-Packard, agrees. "When you think of the 1 billion Web-enabled cell phones and computers [there will be] from a metering standpoint, and you think about the infrastructure necessary to support that network, that's really the scale of the job we have in front of us," Kreitter said.

So, HP and other companies have developed billing mediation systems.

Improved manageability will be essential as the company begins to roll out thousands of collectors to globally distributed collection networks, Kreitter said.

"A lot of people are gung-ho about usage-based billing, but before you actually can get there, you have to have done some data collection and analyzed it so you can figure out what the price ought to be," Kreitter said. "That starts with mediation."

Last month, HP introduced the latest version of SIU. SIU's new management features include administration agents for remote management of the distributed collection devices, a wizard-guided configuration manager that simplifies remote setup, certificate-based security and an expanded developer's kit.

But this does little for the service provider from a competitive angle. "If you go to the trouble of getting all this usage out of the system, you'll see it has a lot more value than just billing," Kreitter said.

As part of HP's SIU platform expansion, the company has developed partnerships to make use of the information it collects. HP teamed with American Management Systems and Packeteer to produce quality of service-based usage billing. It also partnered with OpenPort Technology to provide metered fax and voice mail over IP and with DeskTalk Systems for decision support and business intelligence.

HP is not alone in creating a distributed solution. Xacct Technologies' Xacctusage and Narus' Internet Business Infrastructure use distributed collection methods to deal with the data generated by IP-based networks.

"We take information from the transport layer and transform it into something useful," said Eran Wagner, executive vice president of technology for Xacct. The company's technique calls for probes to be distributed throughout the network as close to the collection points as possible. Xacct considers the probes network elements and manages them through Web browsers.

Though mediation is important in Narus' IBI solution, the company's leader says the term no longer fits the new world of IP.

"Semantic Traffic Analysis is quickly becoming the standard of collecting data in an IP network," said Ori Cohen, CEO of Narus. STA provides a real-time view into all services and usage on the network.