Ericsson has announced that Orange is expanding its business with Ericsson in Switzerland. Part of a five-year contract, Ericsson will provide multi-mediation and multi-activation that will be harmonized on a common platform enabling Orange with a fully automated real-time subscriber management capability.

Ericsson (NASDAQ: ERIC) and Orange are expanding their business together in Switzerland. As part of the new agreement Ericsson will supply core components of the new hardware and software architecture supporting Orange Switzerland’s business processes, or business support systems (BSS). In addition, Ericsson will integrate the platforms into the Orange network and operate it over a five-year period under a managed services agreement. This cooperation expands the scope of the existing managed services agreement that was entered into early in 2013 and covers the operation and field service maintenance of the Orange network.

Initially, the scope of the BSS project will comprise the billing of prepaid subscribers and the so-called multi-mediation and multi-activation features, which will be harmonized on a common platform. Multi-mediation supports the retrieval and processing of user data from all network nodes, so that such data can be made available to the relevant IT back-end systems and billed in real time. Multi-activation provides Orange with fully automated real-time subscriber management capabilities.

Johan Andsjö, CEO Orange, Switzerland said: “The modernization of the systems that support our business processes enables us to focus even more on service excellence. This partnership will safeguard our capability to manage the future traffic and service increase related to the explosion of 4G data. We chose Ericsson as our vendor not least because we are very satisfied with their performance and attention to our quality standard since the beginning of January 2013.

Valter D’Avino, Head of Region Western and Central Europe, Ericsson said: “A BSS modernization enables mobile operators to respond very quickly and flexibly with new offers to changing customer needs. The ever increasing diversity of the applications, services and bundles both consumers and business customers wish to use on their smartphones, tablets and notebook computers requires ever more flexible real-time billing, provisioning and CRM solutions.“