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CRM Vendor FTS Introduces "Business Control Layer" Technology
TMCnet Contributing Editor
CRM vendor FTS, which sells billing and CRM products for Communications Service Providers, has announced the creation of "a new sector of telecom OSS/BSS -- the Business Control Layer."
And there you were, sitting around wondering when we'd get a new sector of telecom OSS/BSS.
Business Control Layer technology has far-reaching implications upon service providers' ability to increase revenue and improve customer service, the Israeli vendor says.
About a week ago Formula Telecoms Solutions announced that it changed its name to FTS.
The company underwent a "wide re-branding effort," according to company officials: "As well as the name change FTS has created a fresh, new visual identity and a new web site which better reflect the sophistication and innovation of FTS' solutions."
Yair Sakov, VP Marketing & Business Development, said the company wanted to "amend our look and feel to highlight this to the market… [our products] now allow Service Providers to understand and dynamically improve the customer experience because they analyze events from a business standpoint rather than just billing them."
The Business Control Layer is a software layer in a service provider's infrastructure residing between the network/OSS and the BSS. (Forehead smack -- "Ohhh, so that's what that is!") The Business Control Layer simultaneously connects to any network infrastructure and includes service management elements from the billing system coupled with real-time charging and network management elements.
Done right, the technology can dynamically adapt network or service behavior, at the customer level, with the hopes of increasing service providers' revenue and maybe even improving the customer experience.
It works by capturing customer interaction events in real time, and then responding in real-time based on a pre-configured set of business policies or actions, such as sending the subscriber a message, provisioning a network element, balance management or rating.
Business Control Layer based products are targeted at CSPs looking to complement their OSS/BSS with business policies and control as well as CSPs looking to inject a business policy layer on top of their network infrastructure enabling better visibility and control of network equipment and services.
Paul Hughes, VP Billing & Payment Strategies, Yankee Group (News - Alert), noted recently that as communication services become commoditized, "the service providers that can reduce churn by giving customers an improved experience, whilst maximizing ARPU are the ones that will prosper." Some see Business Control Layer as a technology that can give service providers the means to achieve that, and get a competitive advantage.
"In the past, service providers have dictated to their customers what types of services they can have, based largely on the capabilities of the network," states Karl Whitelock, Senior Consulting Analyst for Stratecast. "The Business Control Layer is what the industry needs right now; it allows service providers to recognize business events -- not just billable transactions," as nice as billable transactions are, of course.
David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles please visit David Sims' columnist page.
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