Crestel to participate in 16th Convergence India 2008 – Delhi.
Crestel will be participating in the 16th Convergence India - the largest ICT event in South Asia for Telecom, Mobility, Broadcast, Cable and Satellite, Information Technology, Information Security to be held at Delhi from 19th to 21st March 2008. Do visit us at Stall No. D53.
In Spotlight : CRESTEL'S Solution for Enterprise Billing
Features
SLA Management
Crestel allows providers to manage service level agreement (SLA) by defining a stepped schedule of discounts indemnifying customers for any breaches in warranties. These can be defined on a variety of parameters such as throughput, uptime, latency and jitter. It also allows providers to define maximum downtime, minimum downtime, deduction downtime, and a cap on discounts based on threshold violation as well as the calculation period and method. It integrates with SLA monitoring systems to provide discounts to customers on any violation of service commitment. These discounts can be determined by applying various calculation methods such as minimum, maximum, average, total and weighted average. Such comprehensive definitions and integration give the provider greater control to govern and monitor SLA.
Provisioning and Service Activation
Crestel integrates easily with third party provisioning systems, via various protocols, for instant activation of services. In case of MPLS and leased line services, it combines with the Metasolv PMS (Provisioning Management System) and Tellabs NMS (Network Management System) to ensure service delivery on agreed terms and conditions to the customer. It also allows providers to control service delivery on events such as customer deactivation, suspension and termination.
Group Billing
To manage hundreds of service connections of a single corporate account is quite a tedious affair. Crestel puts all service connections of a single enterprise under the umbrella of a group account. This greatly eases the monitoring and management of all accounts in a corporate entity from within a single entity. A single payment can be made for all or any of the bills generated for all service connections of a group. Connections can be added or removed as required, whenever required.
Customer Web self-care
Transparency in transactions is very essential for a healthy provider-customer relationship. Crestel’s Customer Web Self-care interface presents relevant information to customers to keep track of their account, services, billing and payment information. This system interfaces with payment gateways for enabling customers to make online payments and also gives them the freedom to change their existing package. CWSC also displays the definition of the SLA policy applied to the account which displays information on the various SLA parameters. The customer can monitor SLA performance captured from the third party system enabling them to understand and counter verify the SLA discounts provided to them on the basis of the SLA parameters defined in the applied policy.
Attribute Discounts
Flexibility in discounting is a key requirement for enterprise billing solutions considering the rapid changes that competition brings with it. Crestel brings with it a broad range of discounting abilities in the form of attribute-based discounts, which support discounting policies on network, account, demographic, and bill related parameters. The system also supports discounting policies defined based on number of ports, usage volume, and high usage zones. These may be given based on absolute value or a percentage of the amount and can be applied with ease for providing rebates to the qualifying customers.
Differential Charging merged with QoS
Crestel allows charging based on
Committed QoS
Pricing bundled with QoS for a variety of services within the same package
Indemnified through SLA Discounts
Crestel supports bundling of multiple QoS with the tariff of various services within a single package. Providers can thus define different charging patterns for different services based on the quality of each service. For example, consider that the customer has two sites – one for data and the other for VoIP. In case of Data services, uptime and throughput affect the quality of service whereas in case of VoIP, the quality is determined based on jitter and latency. Using Crestel providers can bind different tariff structures (as for Data and VoIP) with different SLA Policies (one for Data considering throughput and uptime, and another for VoIP considering latency and jitter) within the same package. Such a feature helps providers to create a wide-ranging product portfolio with differential charging patterns and thus charge higher price for higher availability of services to customers.
Revenue Sharing
In some real life scenarios it is quite likely that the service provider does not own the end-to-end network. In such a case, where either the core network or the last mile of access network belongs to another provider, services are driven through revenue sharing between these two providers. Since Crestel is capable of charging differentially for the last mile at either ends of the access network and the channel of the core network, it is possible to determine the exact share of revenue for both providers. Crestel provides reports which provide this information based on the percentile of sharing agreed upon by both partners.
3rd Party Integration
Providers always look for products that can work smoothly with third party systems. Crestel communicates easily with external systems using various protocols through its rich set of APIs. For enterprise billing, it integrates with Metasolv PMS using Java Messaging Service, Tellabs NMS using TCP/IP, Order Management System using API calls and Micromuse SLA, to provide a complete workflow from customer acquisition to billing.
