HP deploys converged billing at Wataniya

Wataniya Telecom Algeria became HP’s first deployment of a fully converged billing solution today as the companies announced the February turn up of HP’s Convergent Charging platform.

The solution, which is the result of the long-standing relationship between HP and billing provider LHS TelekomGmgH & Co., will support advanced wireless services and improve customer care for Wataniya’s approximately 3 million mobile users in Algeria. HP also partner with Volubill for content charging.

Maria Marquez-Novarro, business development manager for Converged Charging in EMEA, first contacted Wataniya two years ago. She said that the design of the charging solution and its ability to support billing for multiple services “can help Wataniya and other operators get away from the silo effect and into a more consolidated system.”

HP and its partners will handle billing for the voice services as well as new data services, messaging, entertainment and other personalized, content-rich information. With the HP CC, Wataniya customers will have the flexibility to choose their own method of payment, whether pre-paid, post-paid on a monthly basis or pay-now.

Wataniya has approximately 3 million subscribers, but is growing very fast, Marquez-Navarro said. “One of the key reasons for going with a system like ours was their growth rate,” she said.

Wataniya is now one of the first mobile operators to deploy a fully convergent billing solution that manages both voice and data, on both pre-paid and post-paid plans, according to the Marquez-Navarro. It is a subsidiary of Wataniya Telecom, which provides GSM-based wireless services throughout the Middle East and Africa.

HP also is managing the deployment of the solution with Wataniya and providing primary consulting and integration services. HP’s technology contribution to the converged charging platform is its OpenCall Service Access Controller, pre-integrated with the convergent billing and customer care system from LHS. The solution runs on standards-based HP Superdome servers running the HP-UX 11i operating system. HP StorageWorks XP10000 Disk Array provides a scalable storage infrastructure and HP Operations Support Systems software provides billing systems management.

LHS is HP’s lead partner in EMEA, but the company also partners with other major billing providers such as Oracle, which acquired Portal Software recently.

The HP CC is a standards-based, high-availability solution that has the ability to rate and charge subscribers in real time for voice and transaction-based services, including email, SMS, multimedia messaging, WAP and WLAN usage, web browsing and m-commerce.

“There is a large opportunity with new operators or smaller operators with very high growth rates, but that doesn’t exclude large Tier 1s who want to deploy service quicker and lower their costs, ” Marquez-Navarro said. Because this is a solution that allows them to begin consolidating their systems.”