VAS Engine. Expertise

According to Egor Lednev, CBOSS’ deputy head of VAS development, most operators offer a classic range of value-added services. The main goal here is to provide an intuitive customer interface. To do this, companies use SMS and USSD solutions, IVR and WEB portals. Self-care video portals such as VideoIVR and VideoCallCenter are bound to gain popularity in the booming world of 3G.

IKS №4, April 2009

Modern billing systems need to support call management services (MissedCall, CallMe) and ring back tones (CRBT). Upcoming 3G networks will boost popularity of VideoRBT designed to playback video ring back tones or transmit alternative images during the call.

In 3G networks data services gain the dominant position, posing new requirements to billing systems. Operators need to charge for the whole range of Internet services, provide differentiated access to media content, offer flexible charging for rich media content, support both postpaid and prepaid usage, as well as payment vouchers. According to Lednev, to achieve this, operators need Internet platforms mediating between the billing system and telecommunications hardware and enabling integration of business support systems with hardware and Internet application servers.

Moreover, specific services tailored for various customer groups are another key to success. Such VAS products as corporate telephone networks (VPN) make business service offerings ever more attractive.

For individual users, other services may become the next killer ap – call filtering (CallScreening), alias numbers (ABD), and various call charging models (SplitCharging, CallBack).

The VAS market is growing dynamically. And here operators able to tune their existing services and rapidly launch new ones gain significant competitive edge. This makes a Service Delivery Platform tightly integrated with the billing system another vital component.

So, Lednev says, today it is more correct to speak about billing and value-added products not as separate entities, but rather as a single convergent solution, purpose-built to support tight integration - up to using a single robust hardware platform for real-time operations, such as prepaid charging and SMS messaging.

It also means that the ability to support easy integration with various services and flexible charging rather than support for a strictly predefined set of services is an important requirement to modern billing systems.

Billing systems should be able to easily take up new emerging VAS products.