Cuts meetings, man hours and monetisation gap
Telco cloud app maker Totogi has claimed its new ‘show me the money’ accounting app can expedite the progress of a new service from concept to cash flow. In some cases telcos could be charging for services in a tenth of the time they used to be kept waiting, the company claims. Totogi recently announced that its Totogi Charging System (TCS) is available to telcos in Africa, Europe and Middle East. The web service is available in any of the 26 regions in which Amazon Web Services (AWS) are available. Totogi claimed its software service is the first in the world to help mobile network operators (MNOs) and their virtual counterparts (MVNOs) instantly raise the average revenue that telcos make on each transaction.
TCS on AWS
Danielle Royston, acting CEO of Totogi, explained how telcos would make their money back on the software investment through tangible productivity gains. “It takes telco marketing teams months to get new plans to market, after accessing data and analytics from the IT department, analysing it for trends to act on, building the new plan and, finally, instructing the IT teams to deploy plans onto the network,” said Royston. Those five processes typically take a minimum of four weeks. Then there are endless meetings between Marketing and IT, which necessitate the saving of data for each plan devised. There will be notes for processes such as data analysis, plan requests, IT specs, testing and then, finally, Going Live. During this time the number of meetings between teams can easily exceed 15-20 per month depending on the size of the telco, Royston explained. A cloud app bypasses these stages and stimulates instant action.
Charge engine
The TCS has a charging engine at its core that allows a service provider to instantly charge a subscriber for services. Supplied simply as a cloud app, this ‘online charging system (OCS) handles the subscribers account balance, rating, charging transaction control and correlation. With the OCS, a telco operator ensures that credit limits are enforced and resources are authorized on a per transaction basis. The bottom line for any telco buying an administration tool is the time and money it will save. Acting CEO Royston gave Mobile Europe a breakdown.
Decimate costs
A typical ‘rapid’ on-prem charging system deployment from a legacy vendor takes at least six to twelve months to deploy with an expensive professional services engagement. So telcos would take between 350 and 450 days. That would cost them 2,800 to 4,400 manhours. Totogi claims it can cut these project times to 6-8 weeks, or up to 450 to 700 man hours. At its best, the system could slash the labour costs from 4,400 man hours to roughly a tenth, 450. Apart from being quicker and cheaper to install, the Totogi OCS gets working immediately to rake the money in for the client. “Traditional online charging systems charge the customer after a service is rendered,” said Royston.
No Capex
The Totogi Charging System needs no capital outlay and the vendor claims it can be set up in days, allowing for any CSP to try it as an initial free pilot, after which it starts at $50 per million transactions. Totogi’s approach to plan design is the game-changer, according to one anonymous European Mobile virtual network operator. It allowed the MVNO to bundle popular OTT partners such as streaming and travel offers in minutes. “For decades, operators have been trapped with the incredibly slow project timelines and exorbitant cost of other telco charging offerings. With the availability of the TCS on AWS, we have shortened the deployment time frame from 6-12 months down to a few weeks,” said Royston.