FTS turns billing into business

Herzliya, Israel-based Formula Telecom Solutions, a provider of billing and customer relationship management solutions, last week unveiled its concept of a Business Control Layer, designed to adapt customer behavior at the network and service level and turn it into real-time upsell opportunities and better customer awareness.

The BCL is a software layer in a service provider's infrastructure, residing between the network and the operation support and business support systems. It simultaneously connects to any network infrastructure and includes service management elements from the billing system coupled with real-time charging and network management elements.

“It allows service providers to dynamically adapt network or service behaviors at a customer level in order to improve transaction revenue and/or customer service,” said Yair Sakov, vice president of marketing and business development for FTS.

The BCL captures customer interactions and responds to them in real time on a pre-configured set of business policies or actions, such as sending the subscriber a message after he or she placed an order or reaches a quota. It also provisions network elements and performs balance management and rating.

“The network and the OSS are full of information,” Sakov said. “Everything a customer does creates an event in these systems. Today, these systems either disregard an event or look at it only from a billing standpoint.”

Service providers can exploit these billing events to offer new services, Sakov said, gaining access to IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) functionality in a pre-IMS environment. The BCL basically partitions the billing system and takes much of the decision-making out to the network. It will support events across all network technologies and enable service providers to offer bandwidth-on-demand and do automatic cross-selling such as instant discounts.

Karl Whitelock, senior consulting analyst for Stratecast, said BCL is what the industry needs right now because it allows service providers to recognize business events that allow them to offer the services customers truly want. FTS' first public deployment of the BCL is Telenet, Belgium's largest ISP and cable TV provider. The operator used it to improve its flat-rate broadband charging model, which in turn improved subscriber satisfaction and increase revenues.