Openet Telecom announces availability of FusionWorks 2.0 – usage based convergent mediation solution for providers of WAP/GPRS/IP and 3G wireless services.
June 27, 2000 - Openet
Washington D.C. and Dublin, Ireland, June 27, 2000- Openet Telecom, Inc., a leading provider of convergent data/IP mediation software solutions announced today the general availability of FusionWorks™ 2.0, which has been specially enhanced with capabilities to support the business infrastructure needs of wireless Internet service providers running WAP or 2.5/3G technologies including GPRS, EDGE and UMTS. FusionWorks™ has already been deployed in pan-continental service provider networks, delivering revenue assurance, usage and content based billing mediation, and unified views of customer usage patterns in real-time.
According to Global Mobile newsletter before the decade is out there will over one billion subscribers on the planet with third generation wireless terminals. Each one of those subscribers will have potentially dozens if not hundreds of different value added services to choose from. It will take a very sophisticated business software infrastructure to begin building a future proof path for the operator to profit from this huge surge in multimedia usage. FusionWorks™ has been built from the ground up to address this need of convergence and massive growth in broadband traffic.
"Openet Telecom is proud to be the first company to offer service providers a radically new approach in bringing about change in the way they interact with their customers, introduce, monitor and profit from multi-media services", said Stuart Kelly, VP Sales & Marketing of Openet Telecom. "Operator's are seeing their BSS/OSS applications as secret weapons for sustaining competitive advantage and activating new services before anyone else. Armed with an extremely flexible and scalable business infrastructure layer like FusionWorks™ gives those business support systems the comprehensive, correlated customer usage knowledge they need in real-time, and maximise interaction with the customer".
FusionWorks™ is an open standards based, distributed software platform that enables communication service providers to accelerate the pace at which new value added services are defined, priced and introduced, while still growing market share and profitability. FusionWorks™ provides a single software architecture that allows the service provider to collect comprehensive usage data from all value added services, across diverse networks such as wireless, wireline and packet switched. Extracting the relevant information is the key to success but predicting any subscriber's individual network deployment scenario is impractical.
Openet Telecom has built the flexibility into the FusionWorks™ framework, providing customizable subscriber usage mediation, through an intelligent multi-tiered rules-based engine that facilitates the application of adaptable business scenarios. These business scenarios are fully customizable to support a particular CSP's individual network deployment. At the FusionWorks™ core is the Dynamic Business Engine (DBE), which supports new network elements and content/chargeable data services with little or no downtime, through customizable business logic rules.
"As carriers around the world lay the foundations to deliver converged network services, billing mediation stands out as a major growth opportunity. Billing mediation will be the engine that makes it possible to tie various services together in a single, unified, service offering", said Bob Rosenberg, President of Insight Research, a market research and analysis firm based in New Jersey. "Vendors that can address both worlds with carrier class billing mediation systems will be in the best position to help with start-up ventures grow and incumbent carriers migrate to more cost effective network infrastructures."
Openet's FusionWorks™ is much more than a convergent mediation solution for next generation networks. It is also a catalyst for:
Content and usage based billing
In broadband wireless networks with ‘always on' connectivity, time and distance based billing only is not possible. FusionWorks™ provides collection of service usage metrics that measure the size, type, and even the quality of the content. And unlike circuit switched CDR's, these usage records need to be collected from multiple sources, correlated based on particular business logic rules and delivered to one or more business support systems. FusionWorks™ provides these capabilities in a high performance, scalable and telco-strength software framework.
Crystallizing a single intelligent view of the customer in real-time
With operators determined to increase customer satisfaction, reduce churn and decide what services to deliver next, only comprehensive insight into a subscriber's usage patterns of ALL of the services consumed can achieve these goals.
FusionWorks™ support for collection, mediation and correlation of data/IP derived sources but also fuses this information together with circuit switched voice traffic from wireless or wireline switches to give a unified view of the subscriber's usage behaviour. Armed with this information CRM, billing and customer care, trend analysis, and churn analysis applications can aid in significant improvement in decision making for what services and tariffs to offer next.
Leveraging investment in legacy OSS and network infrastructure
FusionWorks™ modular architecture allows incumbent operators to use and license only the components they need to provide data/IP mediation capabilities, and leverage the investment they have in older mediation systems. FusionWorks™ provides a well-defined, streamlined transition program to provide to power of convergence to all business support systems, not just billing.
Lower cost of ownership
With the power of the Dynamic Business Engine and high performance interpretative interface, adding new data source collectors, business logic, or bringing on ‘hot' service plug-ins requires minimal amount of engineering services.
Virtually eliminate time to market
Less engineering services also means less time to activate profitable revenue generation, the ultimate goal of all operators.
Platform Support
Supporting multiple platforms, and available on HP/UX, Sun Solaris and IBM AIX FusionWorks™ has built-in future-proof extensions for rapid introduction of new services, binary plug-in protocol agents for specific network element types and compatibility with BSS applications for Fraud Management, B&CC, Churn Management, CRM and Subscriber Service Provisioning. Configuration management is via a Java based GUI and can be run remotely in any browser.
About Openet
Openet is a leading worldwide provider of event processing and transaction management solutions. The Transactional Intelligence of the company's solutions extracts increased value from diverse service provider networks, enabling rapid introduction of new services and reliable, cost-effective management of existing services. Openet is focused on delivering best-in-class network edge solutions and specialized engagement processes that create business value from network activity. A global company, Openet's implementations include long-running engagements with the world's leading service providers such as British Telecom, Orange, AT&T and Verizon Wireless. For more information, visit www.openet.com.
