Netcracker Unveils Cloud-Based Online Charging System

Netcracker Technology unveiled a next-gen Cloud-Based Online Charging System (OCS) for helping Service Providers transform their billing for the digital world.

Key capabilities of Netcracker's Cloud OCS include:

• Always-on availability at a lower cost. A software-based approach reduces hardware dependency, keeps costs down and delivers unparalleled availability and real-time functionality.
• Cloud elasticity and scalability. OCS supports horizontal and vertical scalability across all layers.
• Converged revenue management scenarios. Unlike legacy OCS that focused on specific rating and charging schemes, Netcracker's Cloud-Based OCS enables and supports converged revenue management capabilities across all business lines, including pre-paid and post-paid models for all types of services. It also centralizes storage for all rating, charging, subscriber and policy information onto a single product. This simplified data management and its catalog-driven configurations also means that service providers can lower integration costs and reduce the time it takes to bring new and innovative digital services to market.
• Support for VoLTE, virtualized, 5G and IoT services. Netcracker's Cloud-Based OCS, with its faster speeds and extremely low latency, creates the ideal platform for service providers to monetize real-time interactive multimedia offerings, such as augmented reality, virtual reality and real-time online games.
• Deployment flexibility across any physical and virtual environment. Netcracker's Cloud-Based OCS' architecture is designed to be deployed and operated in any environment, including physical, any type of cloud (private, public or hybrid) and virtualized infrastructure. This minimizes the reliance on complex, custom-built hardware and lowers total cost of ownership for service providers.
• Embedded analytics. Closed-loop alignment with analytics and campaign management enables service providers to deliver the right offer to the right customer at the right time.

"Traditional revenue management platforms have not been able to keep pace with the needs of communications service providers as they transform into digital service providers," said Sanjay Mewada, Chief Strategy Officer at Netcracker. "Netcracker has evolved its OCS to address these precise needs. Our Cloud OCS, with its unparalleled elasticity, always-on availability and embedded analytics, removes the barriers to digitalization and allows our customers to rapidly monetize digital offerings, such as VoLTE, 5G, virtualized and IoT services."

http://www.netcracker.com

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Telefónica Germany Delivers Enterprise Services with Netcracker BSS

Telefónica Germany has upgraded and extended its use of Netcracker’s Revenue Management solution to simplify and accelerate its rating and billing processes for its B2B operations. The upgraded solution, which contains additional functionality and enhances performance, runs efficiently across all of Telefónica Germany’s hardware and databases.

Telefónica Germany serves more than 48 million customer accesses.

“We are excited to leverage our instance of Netcracker’s Revenue Management solution to manage our billing operations, which are constantly changing and accelerating as new processes and technologies are introduced,” said Kai-Uwe Laag, Director B2B at Telefónica Germany. “Our partnership with Netcracker will support us to even better provide the services which are highly demanded by our business customers.”

http://www.netcracker.com/

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Ericsson Refines its Adaptive Inventory OSS/BSS

Ericsson released the latest version of its Adaptive Inventory 9.3, adding new capabilities to help operators speed cloud deployments, virtualize network functions and grapple with surging data traffic.

Ericsson Adaptive Inventory, formerly Ericsson Granite Inventory, uses data from a broad range of available sources to offer a view of a network at any given moment, including past, present and future configurations. It features an enhanced Unified Inventory Engine, intuitive web interface, component-driven design automation, and system extension kit. Ericsson has created a migration path to Ericsson Adaptive Inventory for existing Ericsson Granite Inventory customers.

“Access to accurate network data positions operators for better decision-making, including the ability to predict the future-state network from a combination of current and proposed network plans.  The latest tools that Ericsson Adaptive Inventory brings to market are easy use, deploy and maintain, helping operators thrive in an ever-changing environment,” stated Elisabetta Romano, VP Head of OSS & Service Enablement.

http://www.ericsson.com

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NetCracker 10 Suite Adds Virtualization and Analytic Capabilities

NetCracker Technology released its latest product suite, NetCracker 10, which combines capabilities in virtualization, cloud-based delivery of applications, embedded analytics and biometrics onto a single, unified platform.

NetCracker 10 product highlights include:

• Single platform across physical and virtual network and IT infrastructure: NetCracker 10’s single-platform approach enables service providers to address all infrastructure changes and all resource allocation requests in a distributed environment consisting of multiple data centers and points of presence.
• End-to-end service and network orchestration: The NetCracker 10 orchestration solution combines deep-rooted networking and IT expertise and supports large-scale, unique system integration capabilities, enabling providers to deliver personalized services faster and apply an agile DevOps approach to service modeling.
• Embedded analytics across network, service and customer layers: NetCracker 10’s big data analytics component helps increase network planning accuracy by up to 40 percent, increase effectiveness of personalized campaigns by 30 percent and reduce churn by up to 15 percent.*
• Smart location of virtual infrastructure: NetCracker 10 allows service providers to use embedded intelligence and analytics in order to optimize the deployment of virtual functions over servers distributed across the whole network. This reduces unnecessary traffic hops and re-routing and delivers better user experience through proactive network intelligence. It also accurately models projected service demand, optimizes capacity for trending events and aligns demographic requirements with application performance.
• Biometrics-enabled customer experience management: NetCracker 10 focuses on humanizing the customer experience. Beyond the traditional data sources, such as network, service and device, NetCracker’s solution leverages unstructured data from social networks as well as various dimensions of biometric data, including facial recognition, fingerprinting, voice measurement and more, to provide the most comprehensive CEM solution in the communications industry.
• Cloud platform for hosted applications: NetCracker 10’s cloud platform empowers service providers with the ability to build a flexible, open ecosystem that can support innovative business models and a variety of partnerships.
• Virtualized functions, management and infrastructure: New to NetCracker 10 is a proven, field-deployable suite of virtual network functions, management and infrastructure solutions combining leading innovation from NetCracker and its parent company, NEC. With these solutions, operators can build and deploy virtualized networks in an open ecosystem, leveraging technologies from NEC, NetCracker and a wide range of third-party partners.

“We are thrilled to announce NetCracker 10, the next generation of our highly sophisticated end-to-end product suite, which redefines some of the fundamental economics around network and IT, operations, deployment, customer retention and service creation,” said Sanjay Mewada, Vice President of Strategy at NetCracker. “As service providers prepare for the inevitable shift from physical to hybrid to virtualized infrastructure and offerings, NetCracker 10 lays the foundation for a risk-free and seamless migration, ushering in the next wave of innovation.”

http://www.nec.com/

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Amdocs to Acquire Comverse's BSS Unit for $272 Million

Amdocs agreed to acquire a substantial majority of Comverse's business support systems (BSS) business unit assets for approximately $272 million in cash.

Amdocs said it will maintain and support Comverse customers around the world. The acquisition geographically complements Amdocs' market focus by expanding and diversifying Amdocs' global customer base, particularly in Asia Pacific, Latin America and Europe, and including Europe's cable and satellite market.

"Amdocs is a leader in customer experience solutions for the communications industry. With Amdocs' broad range of products and services, this agreement will only serve to benefit existing Comverse BSS customers," said Philippe Tartavull, president and chief executive officer, Comverse. "Customers should feel assured by Amdocs' experience with smoothly integrating acquisitions and their commitment to maintaining and growing relationships."

Comverse will continue to exist as a separate company, with a singular focus on expanding its global market leadership in digital services.

“Size and scale in BSS are critical to succeed in today’s increasingly consolidating telecommunications service provider marketplace, while smaller, niche players face a more uncertain future,” said Philippe Tartavull, President and Chief Executive Officer, Comverse. “The combination of Comverse’s customer base with Amdocs’ BSS products and services creates new opportunities for our clients and Comverse employees joining Amdocs. Now, Comverse can focus exclusively on expanding our existing significant global market leadership in the Digital Services arena, and driving innovation in new segments of the IP communication industry that are expected to grow significantly as CSPs and enterprises take advantage of the rollout of 4G/Volte/LTE services.”

http://www.comverse.com/
http://www.amdocs.com

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Telefónica Selects NetCracker for BSS in 7 Countries

Telefónica has selected NetCracker to transform its BSS platforms for wireless and fixed services in seven Latin American countries. This large-scale, multi-phase BSS and customer experience transformation program encompasses replacing existing billing systems and implementing new product catalog, ordering and omni-channel CRM platforms. The NetCracker BSS solution will support all customers and service offerings for seven LATAM operators. Financial terms were not disclosed.

“NetCracker’s pre-integrated BSS suite will enable our organization to improve customer experience and reduce time-to-market,” said Phil Jordan, Group CIO at Telefónica. “NetCracker’s implementation methodology will also help us standardize our systems and processes across multiple operators.”

“We look forward to delivering this large BSS transformation program for Telefónica, helping the service provider streamline operations and reduce complexity without impairing customer experience,” said Bob Titus, Vice President of Global Solutions at NetCracker. “This is another example of how our industry-leading technology enables service providers to be more nimble, competitive and customer-focused.”

NetCracker Technology is a subsidiary of NEC Corporation.

http://www.NetCracker.com

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Ericsson to Acquire MetraTech for Metadata-driven Billing

Ericsson agreed to acquire Boston-based MetraTech Corp., a provider of metadata-based billing, commerce and settlement solutions.  Financial terms were not disclosed.

MetraTech, which was founded in 1998, offers a flexible billing platform that supports new revenue models and global commerce that are being driven by IoT and XaaS. MetraTech’s metadata-driven MetraNet billing and settlement platform can support new NFV services and business models, as well as services in legacy silos. The company has 140 employees and contractors.

Ericsson said the acquisition extends its expertise in billing and expands its geographic presence in the US.

Per Borgklint, Senior Vice President and Head of Business Unit Support Solutions, Ericsson says: “For a range of industries, thriving in the Networked Society means having the ability to quickly support new revenue models and shift strategies as fast as customer and partner needs evolve. MetraTech’s metadata-based billing solutions strengthen our extensive OSS and BSS portfolio and billing capabilities across a range of sectors, helping us extend our leadership as we support a world with increasingly more connections.”

http://www.ericsson.com
http://www.metratech.com/

• Investors in MetraTech included Accel Partners and Vesbridge Partners.

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ItsOn Releases its Cloud-based OSS/BSS

ItsOn, a start-up based in Redwood City, California, announced the commercial release of its cloud-based  OSS/BSS. The ItsOn Smart Services Platform enables mobile operators to virtualize service policy control, billing and traffic-management functions for data, voice and text, with an optimized real-time, on-device user experience.

The company said the goal of its integrated smart policy and charging solution is to help mobile operators offer highly personalized contextual services and applications-based plans to their customers. The cloud platform integrates with existing mobile network architectures to orchestrate OSS/BSS.

"The only way operators can meet the growing trend toward exciting new use cases such as personalized mobile service plans for families and businesses, sponsored applications, content as a service, on-device contextual marketing and real-time on-device customer care, while also reducing operating costs, is to extend and enhance their OSS/BSS and policy orchestration systems," said Greg Raleigh, Founder and CEO of ItsOn.

http://www.itsoninc.com

• ItsOn secured $28 million in seed, Series A and Series B as well as an additional $12.5 million in an April 2014 Series C round of funding, led by Tenaya Capital with participation from existing investor Andreessen Horowitz. Previous ItsOn investors include Vodafone Ventures, Verizon Investments, SV Angel and an investor group led by Jim Davidson.
  
• ItsOn is headed by Dr. Raleigh, who previously served as vice president of mobile internet at Qualcomm; founder, President, chief executive officer and board member at Airgo Networks (acquired by Qualcomm in 2006); vice president of wireless internet at Cisco; founder and president of Clarity Wireless (acquired by Cisco in 1998); and chief scientist and vice president of research and development at Watkins Johnson Company.

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