10.03.2010

Our Services Untangled

By: Sebastian Nikoloff

The explosion of the Internet, of wireless networks, and the rise in broadband capacity has transformed how we connect to the world. New and innovative services can be delivered anytime, anywhere.. New SAP software enables providers to charge and bill for all these new services.

Eighteen years after the world’s first modern cellular phone network went on air in Finland and twenty-two years after the Internet was opened to commercial use, the global explosion of the Internet, of wireless networks, and the rise in broadband capacity has transformed how we connect to the world. New and innovative services can be delivered anytime, anywhere – everything from applications emailing you scans from the copier, to location-based services on your in-car navigation system, to Internet-based services that we use every day. New SAP software enables providers to charge and bill for all these new services.

We have long moved on from using mobile phones just to make calls. We write e-mails, check the headlines, watch videos on YouTube, upload photos to our Facebook profiles, buy the latest apps, pay for bus tickets, or donate money to charity using our mobile phone.

We expect all of these services to be available wherever we are in the world, be it at home using our usual mobile network or on vacation in Venice, in the Bahamas, or the Himalayas. And of course, our mobile phone provider may also be our Voice over IP (VoIP), IPTV, and home Internet provider and we have high expectations for all these services too.

We can upload hundreds of photos to Flickr while downloading a video on demand movie to our television and if we suddenly have a medical emergency, we expect the call to go through. Digital communications has become our gateway to countless new services.

As consumers, we demand a great deal from the providers of these services: We use services, often simultaneously, from myriad providers, but we expect to receive one consolidated bill with a clear breakdown of all pre- and postpaid charges and, of course, with all information available in real time.

We don’t expect to have to deal with complicated billing and settlements. We do expect to be able to set price caps and receive warnings when our and our family’s spending nears those caps. We do not care how this is done. Let the provider figure it out and that is where IT comes into play.

Highdeal, which was acquired in 2009 by SAP, specializes in pricing, rating, and charging solutions. In other words, it untangles the webs of services, providers, and charges that we weave every day with our communications activities. The French company was spun off from France Telecom as a startup in 2000 and received many awards and customer references due to it’s leading functionality. SAP acquired Highdeal in the spring of 2009. Highdeal’s software product under the SAP banner is the application SAP Convergent Charging. The software helps communication providers to offer the packages and bundles we often take for granted and ensure that each cent on our bill finds its way to the right service provider or partner without us having to think about this complex value chain.

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