Author Archives: Murat Balkan

Service Delivery Platforms

Service Delivery Platforms are around for several years now. Even there is no standard definition of  them, a Service Delivery Platform (or SDP) , would be a platform that a telecommunications service provider uses to deliver and manage telecommunications services over standard interfaces. The SDP concept was defined by several vendors in several different ways. TMForum saw this inconsistency and started… Read More: Service Delivery Platforms »

Category: SDP

Introduction to CEM

Customer Experience Management (CEM) is a relatively new term that entered to the telecommunication service provider’s  jargon. Customer Experience Management is managing all the interactions of the Customer with the service provider. These interactions could be made over all available channels that are defined in the Customer Interface Management process. Call center, e-mail, Web, WAP… Read More: Introduction to CEM »

Transforming the OSS

Products and services that are sold by the service providers use multiple technologies that are implemented by multiple vendors. These vendors deployed their NEs into the provider’s network infrastructure. Each vendor also deployed an EMS system which is capable to manage their (and only their) NEs. These EMS systems are very welcomed by the providers… Read More: Transforming the OSS »

Prepaid Billing

Prepaid Billing systems, (which can also be called charging systems in day-to-day talks), run the billing process for the prepaid customer accounts. They heavily use the online charging mechanism rather than offline charging that we typically see in the postpaid billing systems. Online charging systems rate the usage on-the-fly and charge the user account immediately.… Read More: Prepaid Billing »

Telecoms Fraud Management

Fraud Management systems are designed to detect and prevent the fraudulent behaviors of the users which cause revenue losses. There are multiple types of telecommunication frauds that needs to be addressed by these systems. Different fraud types should be detected and handled by different algorithms. Below, I list some techniques that are used to detect… Read More: Telecoms Fraud Management »

Introduction to Billing

Billing systems collect usage records from devices and generate bills per customer based on predefined rules. Different systems in a service provider’s infrastructure produce logs about the usage. We call them usage data records or UDRs. If the usage is for voice calls, we call them CDRs, if the usage is about bandwidth; we call… Read More: Introduction to Billing »

Telecom Applications Map – TAM

TAM (Telecom Application Map) is one of the frameworks of the NGOSS (Frameworx) initiative. Its main goal is to draw the boundaries of the OSS/BSS applications. Standardized business processes and the applications that run those business processes, emerged in parallel. However, the OSS application vendors named and scoped their applications by themselves without following a… Read More: Telecom Applications Map – TAM »

Introduction to Configuration Management

Configuration management is the process that manages the resource configurations. The term “provisioning” is sometimes used interchangeably with CM. First feature of the configuration managers is to provide abstraction, over the lower layer devices, which leads us to business process consolidation, reduced silos and increased enterprise effectiveness. Let me give an example on this. Suppose,… Read More: Introduction to Configuration Management »