CSG ready with Kenan BP prepaid product

CSG Systems today revealed the company’s first integrated billing solutions since acquiring Lucent’s Kenan/BP business earlier this year. Two new products, Kenan/BP 11.0 and CSG Kenan Prepaid, make use of both platforms to offer a centralized management solution for both postpaid and prepaid subscribers.

The new products mark CSG’s progress in developing modular solutions that can be used across both its legacy CSG billing and customer care platform and the new Kenan platform.

“Version 11.0 is really a further enhancement of the modular approach we have taken with the billing product, allowing service providers to tailor Kenan billing offerings to meet their own business needs and reduce integration costs,” said Alice Bartram, product management director of Kenan/BP for CSG.

The new release also confirms CSG’s growing focus in the wireless space, one that increases the company’s global presence and compliments its leading market share with cable providers and satellite companies.

A primary enhancement in version 11.0 is the use of a CSG-developed module called “operations center” in conjunction with the Kenan/BP billing engine to streamline the operational management in a billing environment. “It monitors performance and progress of the billing operations by flagging certain [configurable] activities and takes a lot of human intervention out of the running of a billing operation,” Bartram said.

The operations center module also employs a rules-based rating option that allows for more sophisticated control of rate plans.

The CSG Kenan Prepaid solution is designed to provide a common view of both postpaid and prepaid customers and supports both voice and data.

“Today most carriers build their postpaid and prepaid systems very differently, but in a convergent world you can have one system manage the entire customer base so you don’t have different classes of citizenship among your subscribers,” said Jim DeMarco, product manager for Kenan Prepaid at CSG.

Demarco blames many of the hiccups associated with 3G on the inability of carriers to charge for services they had hoped to provide and said the CSG prepaid system using Kenan’s rating and charging logic brings that capability into the prepaid data market.