Convergent billing specialist, Cerillion Technologies, unveiled its Total Convergence Architecture (TCA), a new flexible model for telecoms operators based on a highly-respected industry standard framework – the TM Forum’s Telecom Application Map (TAM). The firm’s TCA is designed to help operators move to the next generation of customer management by addressing the challenges of prepaid-postpaid convergence, which until now have remained an unobtainable goal for most telecoms providers.

Dominic Smith, marketing director, Cerillion Technologies, said, “Driven by the necessity to develop and sustain their customer base, grow average revenue per user (ARPU) and lower capex and opex, operators have reached the critical point where they must embrace the convergence of their prepaid and postpaid platforms.”

He added, “Until now, this migration has been held back by the lack of a coherent infrastructure or methodology. The development and launch of TCA helps remove these barriers, giving operators the platform they need to put true convergence into practice.”

Cerillion’s TCA has the flexibility to allow operators to pick and mix components from both billing vendors and network suppliers, utilizing standards-based interfaces such as Diameter to fulfil the integration. It also supports phased deployment and upgrades, with real benefits being delivered at each stage on the path to total convergence.

With TCA, Cerillion is helping operators achieve business improvement at all layers of the Telecom Application Map, covering sales and marketing, product management, customer management, service management, and resource management.

“Previous convergence models have been largely geared to a one-size-fits-all approach,” says Louis Hall, chief executive officer, Cerillion Technologies. “We believe that our approach is completely different.”

He continued, “Our flexible TCA framework reflects the fact that each operator faces a different set of challenges specific to their own market. With this in mind, we have focused on enabling operators to deploy convergence in a way which suits their individual business rather than one dictated by the vendor.”