Comarch, a provider of complete IT solutions for telecoms, has announced the launch of its Digital Ecosystem Management platform. The platform offers communication service providers a comprehensive business solution that facilitates the management of the digital service value chain. The solution automates processes, from service inception, through its modeling, management and fulfillment, to customer service management and settlements with involved partners.
Over the past several years, telecoms have faced increased market saturation and fierce competition with OTT (over-the-top) companies. Applications such as Skype or WhatsApp have been significantly eating into the revenue pie of both voice and SMS services. At the same time, bandwidth demands of these applications are increasing, as are the costs of maintaining the telecom infrastructure needed to deliver them.
This was why many telecom operators have chosen to cooperate – rather than to compete – with OTT players. Thus, the creation of collaborative digital ecosystems, where telecoms and partners (including OTTs) are building and delivering services to customers together. This not only changes the manner in which the services are created, provisioned and billed for, but it also opens up possibilities for telecoms to become service orchestrators and enablers.
Because both roles of partners as well as the capabilities needed to deliver services to end-users are different for each digital service, Comarch Digital Ecosystem Management facilitates the efficient management of multiple services provided by various parties. This includes resellers and providers of vertical applications such as reach media, commerce, cloud, contextual, M2M, and health. Transparent settlements, flexible payments, and invoicing are crucial to efficiently executing the process. For example, a partner can provide billing for one service, while a CSP’s legacy billing system can handle the billing for another service.
“Digital services blend content and information and are IT-centric and network adjacent. In contrast, traditional telecom services are network-centric, vertically integrated silos. If a cable is broken, telecoms already know which services or customers have been impacted. However, even now, in the existing cloud or “internet of things” environment, if an API of a given partner stops responding, it is hard to say how a particular digital service has been impacted from the customer’s perspective. Different and complex settlements, SLA fulfillment, and other areas that involve multi-cloud environments and partners require comprehensive management, all of which we address with our new platform,” says Krzysztof Kwiatkowski, Head of BSS Solutions at Comarch.
“Telecoms have a number of resources they can use to their advantage in the context of digital services. In addition to networks, these factors include data security, quality of service, experience in cooperation with enterprise customers, trusted brand, and the potential of their existing customer base. Comarch has existing expertise in the area of digital services through projects that we have completed within the space of advanced billing projects as well as recent M2M and Cloud deployments. This addition to our portfolio reflects the new market challenges that CSPs are facing and enables us to successfully partner with them in realizing their strategies for the digital era,” Krzysztof Kwiatkowski adds.
The Comarch Digital Ecosystem Management consists of two major domains:
• Partner Domain: Includes a complete list of features necessary to manage partnerships, integration, operations and the monetization of provided digital service
• Retail Domain: Supports the relationships that partners and service providers maintain with end customers. It comes with a set of ready-to-use capabilities and acts as an alternative for existing legacy IT systems
More information on Comarch Digital Ecosystem Management
Related resources:
• White Paper: The Key Elements of Digital Service Definition
• White Paper: How to differentiate your M2M offering to ensure a competitive edge?