Infonova R6 Wholesale Support Providing competitive advantage to wholesale operators

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1 Functional Overview Support Providing competitive advantage to wholesale operators In the telecommunications industry, a country's first wholesaler was typically the incumbent operator who used nation-wide networks and BSS/OSS systems to provide a range of products to telecommunication retailers. In many countries there is now an array of wholesale operators as each telco and service provider tries to maximize the return on their investments at both the wholesale and retail levels. For attackers to be successful in the past, the wholesale supplier provided the lowest price, this in itself is no longer adequate. The industry is now changing more rapidly and in more ways than ever before and the level of sophistication required by service providers is placing additional demands on the wholesale operators. operators need to offer various types of enhanced functionality such as aggregation / bundling of legacy & next gen services, white-labeled managed services, orchestration of all type of third party services, availability checks, credit checking, banking facilities, supply chain fulfillment, outsourced services such as call centers and more, all in real time and with flexible pricing models that can ensure that their service provider has the competitive advantage in their chosen target market. R6 Functional Overview Support

2 The "concept-to-cash" platform has been designed to deliver the complex needs described above. It also incorporates the functionality to enable real time pricing changes by the service provider for their chosen market as well as the functionality to support Telco1.0 and cross industry 2.0 business models. Both are critical functionality, now and in the future. Infonova's R6 is an end-to-end Java realization that has been designed as a multi layer BSS, where the primary operating entity/wholesale operator has full control over all the services connected to the platform. This enables the wholesale operator to regulate which services are made available to each Service Provider, and ensures that each product variant for each operator can be fully maintained throughout the order-to-cash relationship. Infonova's R6 delivers a complete range of conventional and enhanced wholesale capabilities. This breadth of capability enables the wholesale operator to deliver wholesale services in the specific format required to empower their customers with the right competitive advantage, whatever their business model. INFONOVA R6 WHOLESALE SUPPORT Resellers and telecommunication Service Providers require a diverse range of services and solutions to compete successfully in an evolving marketplace. R6 is able to support the rapidly evolving wholesale environment, with its complex resale arrangements, rapidly changing pricing structures and the need to deliver a comprehensive suite of wholesale service offerings incorporating network, unbundled network, 3rd-party networks, and non network related offerings. Customer Reseller Administrator BSS Service 1 Service 2 Figure 1: R6 Support R6 Functional Overview Support

3 Infonova's R6 architecture simplifies and accelerates the introduction and management of both simple and complex wholesale services and packages, for example, legacy type offerings (e.g., PSTN with differentiated time-of-day band and geography-based charging), IP (e.g., event and throttled based charging) or non network based services (e.g., device sales and non telco services, e.g. insurance), and product and account discounting. R6 therefore enables a telecommunications wholesale operator to efficiently support retail operators with a variety of wholesale support and service functionality via BSS Support and Support: BSS Support Unbundled - exposing priced ULL components Service Bundling - aggregated network services in any combination across providers & White-labeled - services wrapped in differently priced offers for delivery by the retail operator) - automated processing to simplify the outsourced actions and reduce the cost of interactive order and service management Support - provide billing feeds for unbundled and bundled services BSS Figure 2: R6 BSS / R6 Functional Overview Support

4 INFONOVA R6 WHOLESALE BSS SUPPORT The BSS Support incorporates the following wholesale operations: wholesale offer management including activation and termination dates managed services for order and service management overall management of wholesale relationships Customer Reseller Administrator Infonova API BSS Figure 3: Infonova API Infonova's R6 provides a full set of functionality to the retailer's agents to perform business transactions, for example, submission of orders, enquiries, service checks, updates such as name or address changes, billing/revenue checks, and more generally, to enable the retail Infonova (Service Provider) operator to interact and follow up with the wholesale operator. For order entry two scenarios can be supported: External Retail BSS Service 1 Service 2 Internal Retail BSS EXTERNAL RETAIL BSS In the first scenario the external service provider uses their own BSS application and connects to wholesale services via the Infonova API to manage his services. The control over order entry resides in the systems of the the retail operator. Upon order placement the control is handed over to the Infonova wholesale platform for service provisioning; after activation the usage information is handed back to the retail operator via wholesale billing feeds and invoices. The retail operator needs to import these feeds into their billing system to process retail invoicing for their customer base. Typically this approach is chosen for established providers with existing systems. In this way the external Service Provider is able to use the Infonova API to set up new accounts and to manage customers and their services. The Service Providers use their own R6 Functional Overview Support

5 tools to collect order information (back-office, or customer self-care on their own website), and to track orders and services. INTERNAL RETAIL BSS In the second scenario, the retail operator uses Infonova's GUI web application. Customer Reseller Administrator Retail Operator Infonova Web GUI (Retail BSS) BSS Figure 4: R6 Web GUI The user interface can be adapted Bundled to the retail / Unbundled operator's brand and market appearance. It can be used for order entry and service management, among other things. The user interface is easy to set up and hosted by the wholesale operator; the retail operator Infonova (Service Provider) only needs a web browser to access the user interface. Typically, this scenario is for retail operators who are new to the market, but it is also a fast-track option for established providers (or ones that are not happy with their current order management capabilities). Similar scenarios have already Service been 1 built for Service operators 2who run Service retail and 3wholesale business in parallel on the same instance of. Infonova's R6 architecture is flexible and can provide whatever functionality the retail operator wants to use via the R6 wholesale interface. R6 Functional Overview Support

6 INFONOVA R6 WHOLESALE BILLING SUPPORT For wholesale billing support, Infonova's R6 enables a telecommunications wholesale operator to target market segments efficiently with separate pricing plans, bill formats, and simple and complex product offers. Retail operators receive billing information for each bill cycle in a file feed from the wholesale operator. This feed contains all product, service and usage information, pre-rated according to the wholesale operator's offer definitions. Retail operators just need to import these standardized files into their own retail billing system to produce invoices for their endcustomers. Customer Reseller Administrator Infonova API Feeds BSS Service 1 Service 2 Figure 5: R6 Support ENHANCED WHOLESALE BILLING SUPPORT Optionally, R6 can also provide capabilities for retail billing as a managed service by the wholesale operator. This is a scenario for retail operators who prefer not to operate their own billing system and do not want to invest in the rollout of a new billing platform. They receive not only wholesale-rated usage information, but ready-to-print invoices and can do all of their customer/offer management and billing through the web application hosted by the wholesale operator. This option provides more customer choice in pricing plans, payment options and bill formatting. Pricing plan features like packaging, discounts and payment options can be implemented easily. Bill formats can be tailored to meet customer-specific needs. R6 Functional Overview Support

7 NEW BUSINESS MODELS FOR RETAIL OPERATORS Infonova's R6 can deliver new business models for retail operators. These business models can be categorized in two ways: Best of the market Bring your own service BEST OF THE MARKET The Best of the Market approach offers each retail organisation connected to the wholesale platform a defined set of services, standalone or bundled, aggregated from all network operators the wholesale operator deals with. Retail operators do not have to worry about multiple contracts, interfaces, business rule sets - they have just one contract and one interface to access the combination of the best services available on the market at any one time. BSS Service 1 Service 2 Figure 6: Best of the Market When the wholesale operator is, for example, an independent bureau, the combined market power of being an aggregator with all the connected retail operators is far superior to any single operator in this scenario. Therefore much better prices and conditions can be negotiated with the physical network operators. R6 Functional Overview Support

8 BRING YOUR OWN SERVICE The Bring your own Service approach brings the possibility of adding a retail operator's own network or service offers to the aggregator's platform to combine both network/service offers in a variety of bundles. This can be done exclusively for the retail operator who brings in services, or it can optionally be made available to other retailers connected to the aggregator - opening up additional revenue streams for both the network/service owner and the wholesale platform/bureau operator. BSS Service 1 Service 2 Retailer Service 4 Figure 7: Bring your Own Service R6 Functional Overview Support

9 INFONOVA Infonova, founded in 1989, specializes in providing technology and business-oriented solutions and services to telecommunications, media, utility and convergent industries. Infonova s BSS solutions have been implemented for incumbent, attacker and cable operators supporting triple & quadruple play service portfolios. Encapsulating decades of knowledge, Infonova s latest BSS product, R6 is a fully J2EE platform that supports real multi-tenant concept-to-cash operations for fully convergent and complex multi-industry 2.0 business models while also supporting Telco 1.0 simultaneously. R6 also delivers transformation scenarios and Pre- & Post-paid Convergence at a fraction the cost and time of traditional integration scenarios. For more information please visit