Life as a Bowl of Cherries

Verizon Wireless CTO Roger Gurnani isn’t much for naming his vendors, but suffice it to say when it comes to billing and customer care, his company works with all of the major vendors for one part of a solution or another. It’s cherry picking, he says, and it allows him to use the best of what the best-of-breed vendors have to offer, even if some of those best-of-breed vendors consider themselves best-of-suite.

Life as a cherry, or a bowl of cherries—which would more accurately describe a vendor with a full complement of software from which the likes of Gurnani can pick and choose—is a life where one’s foot is continuously being wedged in the doorway of prospective and current clients.

A vendor never gives up on a Tier 1 account. It uses its full complement of solutions—now modular, interoperable and standalone as a result of market conditions the last few years—to maintain a presence, no matter how small, in the supportive machinery of a major carrier.
Take Convergys, for example. The billing and customer care vendor was once the mainstay billing system of Ameritech and Ameritech Cellular. Then along came GTE and then Verizon Wireless. In the ensuing big-fish-swallows-little-fish scenario that played out, Convergys didn’t survive. According to Gurnani, “We have converted away from Convergys in all those markets.”

However, Convergys never dislodged its foot from the doorway. As a result, in late March, Convergys licensed its Infinys rating and billing software to Verizon Wireless to help bill for wireless data services.

Gurnani is quick to point out that his company licenses software from many vendors and they all contribute to the overall billing solution.

Amdocs, also a very large billing player, has only a small portion of Verizon’s business. “We have a relationship with Verizon, but not a particularly full one,” said Malcolm Dunn, vice president at Amdocs.

Verizon Wireless is not atypical. Companies such as Nextel, which has consolidated on a single billing platform (Amdocs), are rare among large operators. So billing vendors in particular have had to walk the talk of open systems in order to ensure their continued presence is large accounts in which they might not be the primary vendor.
As content delivery grows and presents more challenges for wireless operators, new opportunities for the software foot-wedge will emerge for billing providers. One such challenge will be billing for quality of service.

Billing based on QoS is not a priority yet, but something the vendors are already positioning themselves to provide. “Traditional quality of service questions that deal with things like transmission speed doesn’t necessarily fit into the equation for wireless content,” Dunn said.

The bigger question is whether or not content was completely and correctly downloaded to a handset and how that information is conveyed across the network to the billing system in a way that identifies quality.
“The only way you can do that is to monitor the network,” said Patrick Howard, director of product management at Convergys.
And so mediation, which collects information used from various network elements rather than merely from the switch, becomes the latest differentiator among the billers. They have anticipated this for quite some time (i.e. Amdocs’ recent acquisition of Xaact Technologies and Convergys’ earlier acquisition of Geneva Technologies) and are positioning themselves for the future wave of data and content billing needs.

The maturity of systems required to bill for quality of service are still in their infancy, according to Rick Findlay, director of wireless industry solutions at Convergys. “When you start pricing for content and people are paying for individual services, but don’t get good quality of service, they will be complaining about it,” he said.

Findlay said QoS will become more important as applications become larger and more complicated. And adding to the complexity of the services and applications themselves will be the number of third parties involved in delivering them. Therefore, partner management will be another variety of cherry vendors can offer to their operators, although they will likely find themselves facing more than their usual billing adversaries in this area.