CSG INTERCONNECT - Telecom Asia · Telecom, Vodafone and Reliance India. These customers select CSG...

© 2011 CSG Systems International, Inc. Confidential and Proprietary 1

Copyright © 2011 CSG Systems International, Inc. and/or its affiliates (“CSG”). All rights reserved.

CSG INTERCONNECT Leading the World in Interconnect Billing

Copyright © 2011 CSG Systems International, Inc. and/or its affiliates (“CSG”). All rights reserved. 2

CONTENTS 03 EXCELLENCE IN INTERCONNECT BILLING

The solution at a glance Recognize business changes & challenges

07 OPTIMIZED INTERCONNECT BILLING Improving your Interconnect operations Managing complex services & partnerships Increasing speed and productivity Cross-portfolio benefits

11 CSG INTERCONNECT

Interconnect core Optional subsystems

CSG INTERCONNECT As the telecoms value chain becomes more complex, the availability

of new IP and Content services is creating new revenue streams, not just for retail billing but also for inter-operator billing and partner billing. Securing these new revenues, while managing your existing voice business, means developing the capability to recognize, rate,

bill and justify the bill to your partners for a much wider range of products and services. \ CSG Interconnect is recognized as the world’s most comprehensive and powerful settlements system, handling every kind of traffic, from simple voice to the most advanced content and data services, in a single, highly-integrated platform. It helps operators across the globe to maintain or increase profit margins and comply with the

broadest range of global standards.


CSG Interconnect is the world’s leading interconnect software solution with over 200 customers spanning all telecoms market segments across the globe including Orange, Telefonica, France Telecom, Vodafone and Reliance India. These customers select CSG Interconnect as the natural choice to improve efficiencies in their wholesale operations and manage the latest content and value-added data services. CSG Interconnect helps organizations to revolutionize their end-to-end interconnect business processes; formerly passive interconnect systems are transformed into real-time business management engines that deliver true control. CSG Interconnect offers advanced settlement functions, web based partner self-care, flexible dispute management features, pre-packaged integration with popular ERP systems, and improved IT management to help operators streamline their operational overhead and cope with the constant changes and challenges in their business models.

Increase Revenue and Improve Cash Flow:

Create new revenue streams from the introduction of IP / content services

Reconcile operator and partner invoices to a high level of accuracy

Enable quicker settlements and efficient management of disputes

Rapidly introduce new products and services without changes to the system

Improve cash flow by invoicing partners on time

Lower Total Cost of Ownership:

Removes the need for multiple wholesale billing systems by providing a fully convergent settlement system for traditional, IP and content services

Reduce unnecessary out-payments Enable a high degree of partner self-care

to cut costs A settlement system which allows more

efficient negotiation Achieve a quick return on investment

Increase Productivity:

Streamline and automate day-to-day labor intensive tasks

Seamlessly integrate with other business and operational systems

Up-to-date information to enable informed business decision making

Manage system with a minimum of resources and effort

CSG INTERCONNECT: Excellence in Interconnect Billing


THE SOLUTION AT A GLANCE CSG Interconnect is a highly cost-effective billing and settlement solution that enables you to administer traditional interconnect agreements and advanced IP/content agreements in a single system. The system can be readily adapted to suit your business processes and supports the following key functionality out of the box:

Management of all types of wholesale agreements including IP / Content agreements with all types of partners

Support for simple and complex rating techniques including advanced revenue sharing and multi-party settlement

Support for cross product / partner discounts, advanced volume based rating

Comprehensive non-usage, recurring and one off charging

Flexible summarization of traffic for better reporting and analysis

Flexible financial summarization and automated posting of pre-estimates, estimates and actuals

Real-time web-based partner access / self-care

Multi-franchise capability with full security

Automated reconciliation of billing and EDR data

Powerful invoicing capabilities that support established ERP systems

Process distribution capabilities on parallel low-budget hardware platforms

CSG Interconnect is a convergent wholesale billing and settlement solution that supports a range of business models and covers the multi-party settlement requirements of operators wishing to partner with a variety of companies such as:

Fixed operators, switched / switch-less resellers

Mobile operators 2G, 2.5G and 3G, MVNOs

International carriers including those using ITU principles

Cable/DSL operators VoIP and messaging providers Content partners, content aggregators,

merchants, sponsors, advertisers ISPs, WISPs GRX exchanges

“We selected CSG’s Interconnect v7 because of CSG’s experience in the

international market. CSG has a proven track record in delivering turnkey

solutions of a similar nature to ours. This was an important factor for us.”

Justin Brochocki, Strategic Sourcing Manager TelstraClear


Operators need to respond to change faster than ever to combat declining voice revenues and enable growing numbers of next generation services. CSG Interconnect enables operators to rapidly enter new markets, improve cash flows, and reduce bad debt through streamlined and rapid billing cycles, tariff updates and settlement procedures.


Flexibility: The large number of interconnect and content partner agreements means that operators need to have flexible business processes, systems and control structures in order to manage their operations effectively. CSG Interconnect offers the inherent flexibility to adjust agreements to market conditions, change pricing and revenue share, set-up partners and services, analyze liabilities and opportunities, and provide consistency of network facilities among carriers quickly and easily.

Automation: As interconnect arrangements and product definitions become more complex, automation becomes an increasingly important factor. CSG Interconnect allows the automation of wholesale billing processes including agreement management, trading and routing, rate loading, price management, invoicing and settlements, financial interfaces and reconciliation.

Rapid reaction to change: Operators need to respond to change faster than ever to combat declining voice revenues and enable growing numbers of next generation services. CSG Interconnect enables operators to rapidly enter new markets, improve cash flows, and reduce bad debt through streamlined and rapid billing cycles, tariff updates and settlement procedures. CSG Interconnect is a highly flexible system that allows operators to ensure that the claims that are made on them from partners are accurate, allowing them to effectively manage costs, revenues and margins.

Business insight: Transparency of interconnect operations, including end-to-end audit trail and drill down through financial data allow for an informed approach to the management of wholesale agreements. CSG Interconnect gives you visibility of the whole interconnect operation so that business decisions can be made which maximize profitability.

Cost control: CSG Interconnect is a highly flexible system that allows operators to ensure that the claims that are made on them from partners are accurate, allowing them to effectively manage costs, revenues and margins. With CSG Interconnect, cash flow can be improved and cost of ownership lowered compared to in-house or proprietary systems.

Regulatory compliance: CSG Interconnect allows operators to address new charging models and regulatory compliance mandates with minimal disruptions to operations or need for IT development

RECOGNIZING BUSINESS CHANGES & CHALLENGES


Improving Your Interconnect Operations

CSG Interconnect increases productivity by optimizing the process of settling invoices or payments received from inter-carrier partners. The single, consolidated platform handles all the data in the network and supports any type of traffic, whether it is voice, mobile, data, IP, value-added services or content. This provides all interconnect functions with consistent and reliable source data and a clear picture of finance, performance and market information.

Accelerating the Billing Cycle

To help eliminate delays in revenue recognition and improve cash flow. CSG Interconnect removes cumbersome, repetitive administrative processes associated with generating interconnect statements – loading of tariff plans and rates, filtering, editing and enrichment of EDRs, service and tariff changes, and production of legal account documents– generating invoices and statements quickly and assuring that they are more accurate, controlled and auditable.

Powerful Rate Management Quickly load tariffs, communicate changes, spot discrepancies, and make amendments more accurately than ever before. CSG Interconnect offers a bulk load facility that automates the process of updating carrier rates and codes via a graphical user interface, eliminating the discrepancies often incurred in manual inputting of complex tariff rates and delays in communicating changes. This is essential to the accurate verification and settlement of invoices.

Effective Dispute Management Settlement of interconnect charges between operators can be a complicated and time-consuming task. CSG’s Automated Reconciliation Manager allows better cash flow management by ensuring amounts payable and receivable can be actively traced and monitored at different stages in the settlement process. The system also identifies areas of dispute and suggests ways to resolve them. This eliminates lengthy reconciliation periods, offers better resource utilization, and lowers operating costs.

Streamlining Invoice Production Streamlining invoice production is an integral part of CSG Interconnect by enabling flexible management of billing periods to ensure maximum invoicing and cash flow flexibility. For example, billing periods can be segregated into revenue and expense elements. This means that the revenue elements can be closed off and invoiced immediately, eliminating the need to wait for outstanding rating information to be in place before the billing period can be closed.

Flexibility to Support All Business Models CSG Interconnect supports all types of business models including ITU settlements, destination and distance based charging, bilateral and volume based agreements, advanced revenue sharing, refile, international resale, direct, cascade and indirect billing as well as nonevent billing for network services such as, leased lines, shared infrastructure billing, co-location fees, Wholesale Local Loop Unbundling, subscription based content and bit stream access. CSG Interconnect also caters for a number of market-specific business processes including Element Based Conveyance (UK), Carrier Price List (UK), Codifi (Spain), and Pisa Mexico).

CSG INTERCONNECT: Optimized Interconnect Billing


Managing Complex Services & Partnerships

Actively Manage Interconnect Agreements CSG Interconnect enables the active management of interconnect agreements. The system offers the complete transparency needed to monitor and drive performance of each business relationship through real-time business rules. This can lead to the creation of new agreements, pricing strategies, and incentives and the resolution of issues such as unprofitable agreements, bad debt and inadequate service provision.

Drive Revenue through Next Generation Billing To make next generation services truly profitable operators need high levels of billing flexibility, data quality and rapid service deployment. The system offers unifying technology to manage both traditional and new interconnect models– including value-based billing, capacity based, recurring charges, IP peering arrangements, GPRS roaming, multi-franchise support, multi-party settlements and revenue-sharing agreements for partners, sponsors and advertisers – all from a single convergent system.

Reducing Costs of Managing Partners A single point of contact is essential to the efficient management of a growing number of partners. CSG Interconnect provides a secure web portal that allows partners to manage their own accounts, query their agreement details, and make statement and traffic enquiries. This significantly cuts the costs of dealing with queries and issues and helps to economically manage a large number of interconnect and content partners.

Launching Innovative New Services The challenge for operators is to provision new services as quickly and cost-effectively as possible without the need to perform complex and expensive system enhancements. CSG Interconnect offers powerful rating, tariffing and discounting capabilities for traffic, recurring charges and one off events, allowing the definition testing and launch of attractive and innovative products to market faster than competitors, and ensure that the network is optimally used to maximize product margins.

Revenue Assurance Controls Powerful task recording and revenue assurance controls manage the integrity of tariff data and monitor performance, allowing audit control, SOX compliance and integrity reporting. This also allows billing managers to ensure that billing accuracy is maintained during the introduction of new services, pricing structures and partners.

“CSG’s Interconnect billing solution has been selected for its proven capabilities in simplifying billing and reconciliation and we

are confident that our investment will yield greater interconnect

profitability and improved network performance.”

Tariq Rashid, CIO of Mobilink


Increasing Speed and Productivity

Managing Complex Services & Partnerships CSG Interconnect is designed to enhance productivity. Features include Smart Re-pricing, which automatically tracks reference data changes and offers Summary-level Re-pricing if appropriate. New reference data management features include Common Rate Books, Overrides, Multi-row Delete / Authorize and additional On-line views (Pending / Authorized / Both). In addition, the correction of errors assists users in actively resolving issues.

Sophisticated Reporting and Analysis Powerful standard reporting functionality ensures that decisions are made based upon timely and accurate information. End to end billing information, both summary and itemised and all reference data is available for reporting. A Business Objects Universe is provided, allowing standard and custom reporting using the industry standard Crystal Reports. In addition, a documented semantic layer provides access to all information, enabling the production of customer-specific reports using other third-party reporting tools.

Highly Scalable System CSG Interconnect is highly scalable and has been benchmarked to process over 1 billion CDRs in an 8 hour window. This high performance also scales downwards on lower volumes of data. The system offers increased speed of both processing and data loading. For data loading, integrated bulk loaders run as server components, allowing the processing to occur on the powerful multi-CPU server, but retaining full validation by common components shared with the GUI interface.

Lowering Your Storage & Hardware Costs The ability to deploy additional rating engines that run on lower cost hardware provides a cost-effective and readily scalable solution. CSG

Interconnect also uses advanced techniques, such as compression, to keep storage costs to a minimum. Users can specify how data should be compressed, and at what level, before export takes place. This greatly reduces data storage needs– helping not only to increase the efficiency of the process but also to reduce overall costs of ownership.

Wholesale Business Management The CSG Wholesale Business Management portfolio offers a broad range of complementary products to support accurate wholesale billing and settlement using Interconnect. It provides OptimiZed Routing functions to maximize wholesale margins, Content Partner Management to support emerging requirements such as revenue sharing and multi-party settlement for IP/Content services and Contract Management to support rapidly changing wholesale agreements and rates. All fully integrated with enterprise standard reporting, pre-processing and mediation capabilities.


"Through Interconnect Digicel has the capability to charge other interexchange and local exchange carriers without delay while automatically reconciling our own invoices with their incoming bills. There is a minimum requirement for staff to support the process since everything is handled by the system. As a result we can keep our operational overhead relatively low without impacting our efficiency in settling with other carriers." – Jermaine Nicolas, Interconnect Billing Executive, Digicel


Wholesale Billing and Settlement Manager

At the heart of CSG Interconnect lies the Settlement Manager, which offers powerful convergent interconnect rating and settlement features essential to the effective management of your interconnect operations. Combined with powerful modeling capabilities, you can intuitively manage the connectivity with other operators and business partners and the rating of all types of event and non-event traffic items to be exchanged.

Reference Data Management All the repetitive tasks of loading and maintaining reference data for each agreement are simplified. The system offers an integrated bulk loader, a reference data API for integrating adjunct software and flexible data management capabilities. This significantly reduces the amount of data maintenance required and is essential for operators with large or growing numbers of agreements operating in an environment of constant change.

Convergent Wholesale Rating It is essential to respond rapidly to changes in agreements, rates and business models to ensure that billing accuracy is not compromised. CSG Interconnect is a single convergent solution supporting event and non-event rating that offers the inherent flexibility to manage frequent changes to individual calls and ‘billable events’ including rated traffic, ad hoc charges, commissions, discounts, revenue share, traffic and volume agreements, etc.

Accurate Rate Changes As tariff rates frequently change, operators need the flexibility to update and amend rates accurately and prevent errors and delays in realising interconnect revenues. The system offers intelligent re-pricing features that actively identify records for which rates have changed and automatically schedules re-pricing work flow for these records, minimizing the opportunities for users to make errors.

Rapid Statement Generation Speed up cash flow and statement generation by exploiting Flexible Billing periods. CSG Interconnect enables the Billing Period to be segregated into Statement Type, Revenue, and Expense elements. This allows the revenue element to be closed off and settled immediately without having to wait for the cost side of the billing period to be rated and closed.

Discounting And Special Charges React more quickly to market changes using the range of flexible and userdefinable discount plans. Discount traffic can be defined in detail by traffic types and data driven selection of traffic summaries, discounts can link between different network operators and across multiple periods. It is also possible to define where in the Billing Report details of discounts should be included.

Data Summarization The storage of unnecessary and duplicated data can be significantly reduced with CSG Interconnect. The system’s flexible architecture enables users to specify how data should be summarized and at what level, to cut data storage needs. Also, this enables users to query summary records based on any criteria, guarantee data recoverability, view meaningful revenue assurance statistics, and ensure consistent batch throughput.

CSG INTERCONNECT


Multi-Party Settlement CSG Interconnect allows operators to maximize their profit from the delivery of services offered to subscribers and partners over new network technologies, service delivery platforms, and open infrastructure gateways. The system enables multi-party and multi-point settlements between an unlimited number and range of partners, including managing the tiering of partners, different billing arrangements and complex revenue sharing.

Smart Error Management The CSG solution helps operators to be more efficient and productive by eliminating labor-intensive processes of manually correcting reference data errors. Using Smart Error Management technology, data errors can be rapidly managed and corrected, to maximize billable revenue and control the auditing of all changes to EDRs.

Interconect Reporting Access to critical business information is needed to effectively manage cost, revenue and margin for all interconnect partners. Standard reports are provided to meet regulatory needs, manage costs, audit billing, predict traffic data trends and issue statements. The system also provides direct and seamless access to external reporting products such as Crystal Reports.

Volume Based Rating The Volume Based Rating feature enables operators to gain or give incentives to partners based on the volume of data transacted over a given period. It caters for multi-conditional volume thresholds and provides the ability to apply penalty rates based on a range of options. Usage thresholds can also be specified as a percentage of criteria, e.g. commitment is that 20% of traffic should be mobile.

Full Rating Support CSG Interconnect offers full rating of data (e.g.,SMS) and content (e.g.,MMS) traffic, in addition to traditional voice traffic for a variety of different scenarios including multi-step and multi-component rating rules. Matrix Rating offers the ability to perform advanced rating, using a combination of user-defined fields. This is extremely useful when it comes to introducing new products and services where rating variables cannot be anticipated in advance.

Advanced Revenue Sharing Revenue share agreements for wholesale content billing are becoming far more complex, as a result of highly involved tariffing, personalized content, and performance-based agreements. CSG Interconnect offers advanced revenue share capabilities, including flexible weighting of revenue-shares to encourage partners, this addresses regional interconnect variants and next-generation content services.


Optional Subsystems

CSG understands that the interconnect needs of operators differ according to their market and product sets. In addition to the core product, CSG Interconnect consists of a set of subsystems that can be tailored around your particular needs.

Pre-Processing Manager The Pre-processing Manager actively collects data from network elements or mediation systems through advanced acquisition features. It offers a high degree of data filtering and manipulation through its advanced data management and business logic processes.

Data validation EDR enrichment and transformation EDR filtering and editing

Partner Relationship Manager The Partner Relationship Manager offers the infrastructure for secure online access to CSG Interconnect and a high degree of partner self-care. The portal allows partners to access up-to-date and reliable information to query their agreement details and view their transactions.

Secure partner self-care Web portal View agreement details Drilldown from summary to rated EDRs Up-to-date partner information on rated events Secure profile and publication process for partner managers Support for refund management

International Settlement The International Settlement Manager provides a common framework for international operators to model international agreements, including traditional ITU, refile, hubbing, and other route-based interconnect agreements. The system offers a high degree of flexibility enabling entry into profitable agreements with a wide variety of partners.

Full route-based/total accounting rate billing

Support for refile, hubbing re-origination, and buy and sell rates

Bi-lateral billing management Inbound and outbound declarations and

invoices (electronic or manual) Verification between declared and

measured traffic aids in detecting traffic under-declarations and eliminates revenue leakage

Integrated net settlement statement to net revenue

Automated Reconciliation Manager The Automated Reconciliation Manager is a powerful tool that can assist with the rapid resolution of disputes. It is designed to meet a wide variety of reconciliation models and automates the process of comparing interconnect charge information from multiple interconnect systems. It enables information to be compared at multiple levels of detail, ranging from the comparison of billing summaries to the comparison of EDRs. This allows for significantly reduced settlement times and improves the accuracy of interconnect charges.

Traffic event based reconciliation Revenue event based reconciliation Revenue summary based reconciliation Fuzzy mapping controls (e.g. match part of A or B number)


Financial Manager

Interconnect Financial Manager complements the Interconnect suite, offering invoice generation, design and control. It also provides user defined data aggregation and mapping, customized data layouts, account tracking and management control of ERP Interfaces.

Generation and control of balance and cash flow

Pre-defined and user-defined transactions User definable alarms and notifications, e-

mail and SMS Group and User advance payment

administration (pre-pay) Support for SAP, Oracle or other ERP

system Secure (https) web based graphical user

interface

Recurring Charges Recurring Charges Manager provides for charging and settlement of agreements that are not based on events, such as leased lines and co-location fees. It provides comprehensive support for nonevent billing including billing in advance or arrears, early cancellation including pro-rata repayment/penalty charging as well as flexible recurring charge periods ranging from days to months or years.

Multi-dimensional rating Tiered, threshold and capped rates Supplementary agreement information

Contract Manager Typically the data from a single rate sheet can easily take two weeks to load by hand, and there will be errors. Contract Manager can load a rate sheet in just a few minutes and with 100% accuracy. Rapid and automatic loading of buy rate sheets into Interconnect. Analysis of rate sheets to quickly identify changes to dial plans and rate increases. The rates can be replicated across multiple business units and products as required. Rounding options can be defined and a Revenue share value can be applied. The following data types are loaded.

Destinations (tiers) Network addresses(CNP – number

prefixes) Rating rules – who gets paid or pays Rating calendars Rates

“An upgrade to Interconnect v7 from CSG International will improve Indosat's ability to accurately and cost effectively bill and settle, with all its national and international partners, for the full range of services it offers, from basic telephony to the most advanced next generation services." -- Azinul J Adrian, VP of IT, Fixed Access Division, Indosat

Calculation of recurring charges tiered by event volumes

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© 2011 CSG Systems International, Inc. All rights reserved. Although every effort has been made to ensure that the information contained within this document is up to date and accurate, CSG Systems International, Inc. cannot be held responsible for any inaccuracy or error in the information contained within this document.

ABOUT CSG INTERNATIONAL

CSG Systems International, Inc. (NASDAQ: CSGS) is a market-leading business support solutions and services company serving the majority of the top 100 global communications service providers, including leaders in fixed, mobile and next-generation networks such as AT&T, Comcast, DISH Network, France Telecom, MasterCard, Orange, T-Mobile, Telefonica, Time Warner Cable, Vodafone, Vivo and Verizon. With over 25 years of experience and expertise in voice, video, data and content services, CSG International offers a broad portfolio of licensed and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)-based products and solutions that help clients compete more effectively, improve business operations and deliver a more impactful customer experience across a variety of touch points. For more information, visit our website at www.csgi.com

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CSG INTERCONNECT - Telecom Asia · Telecom, Vodafone and Reliance India. These customers select CSG...

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Transcript of CSG INTERCONNECT - Telecom Asia · Telecom, Vodafone and Reliance India. These customers select CSG...