CBOSS Success: Benefits of HP OpenCall in the International Telecommunications Market

Abstract of Andrey Morozov’s presentation at the HP & CBOSS press conference

CBOSS and НР: Collaboration of Two Transnational Corporations

In 1996, when CBOSS started building packaged billing solutions in the Russian market, carriers stated that a packaged solution cannot work in different networks. They reasoned that every network is unique and requires customized functionality. But, generally, it is not true. Taking into account the requirements of our customers, analyzing and generalizing them, and distinguishing the most important ones, we stuck to the industrial approach in the creation of our convergent products. And time has proven us right.

Today, CBOSS is a transnational corporation with production and representative offices in many countries: Russia, Europe, South-East Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. CBOSS staff is also transnational: we employ Russians, Finns, Swedes, Americans, Hindus, Africans, Vietnamese, and Laotians. CBOSS belongs to the few Russian companies, which grew into a transnational corporation and collaborates across the globe with another acknowledged transnational corporation. We are sure that the CBOSS-НР partnership will improve, deepen and expand.

CBOSS – Convergent Business Operating Support System

CBOSS develops state-of-the-art software and information technologies for telecommunications, using innovative tools from such global vendors as НР. CBOSS is one of the acknowledged world’s leading vendors of comprehensive convergent solutions in telecoms. Convergence has only recently started gaining its momentum, while CBOSS has long ago realized the technology trends, placing special emphasis on convergence. Moreover, CBOSS has included the word “convergence” into the name of its flagship product and the company's name. CBOSS is the Convergent Business Operating Support System. It is not surprising that today our convergent solution operates on all five inhabited continents.

CBOSS-2007: 3D convergence for 3Gsm

The partnership between CBOSS and НР gained further momentum three years ago, when young CBOSS acquired the OBS business (Online Billing Solutions) of experienced Fujitsu Services with its 25-year history. Now, the powerful real-time billing system based on the unique HP NonStop platform has two names: rtBilling™ as a trademark and CBOSSrtb.

As rich heirs (CBOSS – via Fujitsu ICL – from Nokia, and НР – via Compaq – from Tandem), we realized the benefits of our partnership. We integrated the reliable HP-based solution into the CBOSS product portfolio, made significant investments, created a comprehensive convergent product and entered the market with this powerful industrial state-of-the-art and timely solution.

Today, rtBilling is the best solution for telecom carriers in the CIS countries. The benefits are turnkey supply, lowest TCO of an industrial solution offering exceptional reliability and scalability, as well as 3G-readiness.

CBOSS’ motto for the year 2007 is “3D convergence for 3Gsm World”, i.e. “three-dimensional convergence for the third generation and GSM world”. Three-dimensional convergence means:
1) convergence of payment methods (prepaid/postpaid)
2) convergence of supported service types (voice, data, etc)
3) platform convergence, when a single platform supports everything.

And new CBOSS’ slogan is in concert with the motto of this meeting: “OpenCall – an Open Call to the World of Telecommunications”. So, without any special agreements with HP, we promote a common idea.

IT Wars on Telecoms Battlefields

Traditionally, technologies of a telco involve IT infrastructure and network infrastructure. In times of explosive growth in the telecommunications market, traditional suppliers of the network infrastructure, using the 3G fetish, gained immense power and launched an attack on the IT world.

Network suppliers encroached on the traditional field of responsibility of IT suppliers, striving to seize their historic lands, including rating & billing and customer care. IT suppliers decided to fight the aggressors and responded with a counter-attack getting back charging, OSS, customer care and capturing prepaid, service control, mediation and HLR in addition.

Having got a taste for acquisition, such IT suppliers as НР – in partnership with CBOSS – moved even further, encroaching upon IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem).

This is how I can describe the situation in military terms.

Advantages of HP OpenCall from CBOSS’ viewpoint

HP NonStop Kernel underlying rtBilling is not only a highly reliable, but also absolutely fault-tolerant solution, if correctly built and configured. In addition, it is disaster-proof and provides the most accurate computations, i.e., it is protected from CPU-level failures, as well as errors during data transfer to RAM or to bus. The world has never experienced such reliability. Soon you will see the super highly reliable and scalable solutions based on the HP platform surpassing every IT and Telecom technology in architecture, ideology, and implementation. For our part, we guarantee a very attractive cost of these solutions.

The HP OpenCall software features the same reliability. HP OpenCall is an integrated environment enabling development, management, and implementation of various services. It is a management system for all communications, which is fundamentally built on NonStop Kernel as an operating environment of super reliable, powerful, and scalable computers delivering zero downtime, even under maintenance. Some of CBOSS’ customers have been operating the real-time billing system for seven years running, not interrupting operation even for a second, even in the course of many upgrades.

As regards the application part of rtBilling, the results of 25 years of R&D are apparent: unique functionality and great opportunities. First of all, they include flexible charging in real-time, support of hybrid accounts, superb performance and reliability alongside the lowest Total Cost of Ownership in the class. Second, it is the integration of the solution with the CBOSS product portfolio that allows the automation of all aspects of telecommunications business including customer care; CRM; telematics and messaging services; network monitoring, management and mediation; business intelligence and enterprise management, etc.

Real-time systems cost more than traditional servers, and we divide systems into real-time and near real-time. Today, in the field of systems requiring real-time operation there exists an integrated reliable platform that allows IT suppliers themselves to implement a considerable number of solutions, i.e., independently of traditional telecom suppliers. And these solutions will be much cheaper to purchase, own, and maintain, as compared to the cost of ownership of telecommunications solutions.

CBOSS + HP OpenCall = Success Stories

The success of the comprehensive solution has been proved by dozens of installations all across the globe. Here are the most prominent examples:

1. The Nepalese telecommunications company Spice Nepal Private Ltd. The project was being implemented under terrible conditions in 2005. The period was characterized by political instability, insurgents, and shooting. There were impudent monkeys in the streets pilfering everything up to laptops. Who can install a reliable efficient solution in a war zone? CBOSS and HP of course. Specialists are sometimes shocked when hearing about this. But everything there – the whole IT infrastructure from CBOSS and HP – is operating in real-time without any problem. In 2007, the first privately-owned telecom of Nepal will have over one million customers.

2. Vladivostok (Russia), New Telephone Company. The CBOSS end-to-end convergent solution based on HP’s platform. Implementation term - 6 months. It is a convergent solution from both service and settlement viewpoints. And we hope that very soon there will be another convergence dimension added: convergence of platforms. In fact, the platform consists of two parts, traditional and real-time, which allow us to implement any requirement for any operator.

3. Azerbaijan (CIS), Azerfon. Three of four national Azerbaijani telecommunications companies are operating CBOSS solutions. One of them is a start-up using the GSM-2.75G network from Siemens and the CBOSS comprehensive convergent solution based on HP OpenCall. Project duration – 9 months, caused by the supply of telecommunications equipment from the original vendor. The start of commercial operation is planned for 1Q2007.

Answers to Questions from Journalists

- Do you think it necessary to comply more fully with customer’s operating conditions? The high reliability requirements you were speaking about apply to hardware components only. System reliability has not been a concern of the market so far.

А. Morozov: I disagree. First of all, there is a system or consumer requirement. For example, during the cold war there was the following consumer requirement: the system monitoring nuclear-missile attacks should be always running, irrelevant of its design. This consumer requirement brought billion-dollar investments into the Tandem technology, because it was the only way to guarantee such exceptional reliability. And the reliability requirement applied to the whole system, independently of its architecture. Moreover, this determined the architecture of the system, as well as software and hardware. Vast investments were required to ensure such reliability, and they were made.

Who else later posed such high consumer requirements? These were banks and card payment systems. Can you imagine, what would happen, if all Visa credit cards are out of service for half an hour? Almost an emergency! And it is not an architectural requirement: you do not even know what architecture is used, but we are sure that Visa is continuously available worldwide. This requirement appeared in course of civilization development and the growth of importance of IT technologies. And it brought about the need to design such system and hardware solutions that are able to guarantee such reliability. НР NonStop is a platform hosting such solutions.

The progress in telecommunications allowed customers to require high reliability in SMS and voice services. It is a problem when a modern carrier interrupts its service due to any reason. Yesterday it was still tolerable, but today it is already unacceptable. The new customer requirement to the platform in modern telecommunications companies is reliability. We deliver reliable solutions not simply since HP offers such platforms, but because the market already demands them. There is a business requirement to reliability, which determines the requirements to the architecture, system solutions, comprehensiveness, integration and convergence, and implementation. It also determines requirements to the platform hosting all these. This is why many established operators today say that from the technical perspective, 200 Linux servers are worse than a single 16-processor NonStop Kernel server. They understand that it is the only way to comply with the system requirements, which would guarantee the desired reliability.

- Your rtBilling solution depends on the firmware of the hardware platform. It is understandable, that НР OpenCall is implemented on the hardware platform from НР. But CBOSS offers solutions on other platforms also. Have you ever considered implementing your middleware on hardware platforms from other vendors?

А. Morozov: It is a very good question. But I would like to make a correction: rtBilling is a real-time billing solution, which is not dependent on the firmware, and this is where the convenience of using HP lies. HP places its INS middleware between the NSK operating system and application software. The middleware layer is responsible for interfacing between the platform and applications and guaranteeing compatibility with all thinkable standards, including interaction with telecoms hardware.

You are asking, whether we are planning to implement something like INS on platforms from other vendors. Before our partnership with HP, we implemented the same middleware on the universal CBOSSasap platform, which now hosts many of our solutions. Today, we are in the process of integration to enable support of both CBOSSasap and INS. But these are solutions of different classes. When we speak about the implementation of functionally the same middleware on platforms from other vendors, we understand that we shall never achieve the reliability enabled by the INS platform under NSK. If you wish to provide the same functionality to 2 million of subscribers, you may have 40 computers with all software running properly. But the reliability, manageability and resource use efficiency will fall down. From the system perspective, such a solution is much less perfect, from the functional perspective, it is fully operable, but consumer characteristics are different. If you need a cheap solution, we also have it. But when growing operators realize that they need to ensure exceptional reliability, scalability and service unification, they demand architectural changes, and we provide migration services. An example is NCC. They used to run solutions based on our middleware. When the operator started growing and acquiring a large number of new subscribers, they needed an industrial platform, i.e. the consumer requirement to reliability grew significantly. We replaced the whole “IT bestiary” with HP hardware, and CBOSSasap software with HP INS, saving the carrier’s investment in the cheaper legacy platform. I.e., we performed a trade-in and provided an effective replacement with a really good solution based on the industrial NonStop technology.

Thank you for your questions!

Presentation from HP Software Forum