MATRIXX

A Unique Approach to Converged Charging Migration

Highlights, Tech // Aug 28, 2023

Geopolitical directives are mandating that telcos in certain parts of the world migrate to new suppliers for sensitive elements of their infrastructure. One of those key areas is converged charging, given its critical role in real-time spending and usage management.

As telcos struggle for sustainable growth, this migration enables them the opportunity to re-think and re-platform their monetization strategy with a renewed focus on digital monetization innovation, a clear goal of significant time to market reductions, a significantly reduced cost floor and an improved revenue and margin position.

The de-risking and ease of migration to that environment, covering the interface migration to northbound BSS systems, data/data model migration and journey process integrity, is critical.

The deployment-proven MATRIXX Software and TALLENCE migration framework provides a significant enhancement in real-time converged charging/monetization capabilities in telco B2C, B2B, wholesale and IoT segments along with breakthrough cost and time savings in the migration phase from legacy charging products to the MATRIXX solution. The combination of a “SaaS-like” out-of-the-box configurable product and an automated migration framework puts real decision-making autonomy back in the hands of telco teams, mitigating risk and significantly reducing migration timeframes.

By automating standard tasks, organizations can reduce migration risk and project duration costs by an average of 40%.*

The MATRIXX Software Approach to Monetization

MATRIXX Software’s approach to monetization is unique. The company’s founding principles were based on building and delivering an architecturally integrated platform solution for telcos monetization needs. This goes well beyond the default capabilities of legacy charging systems as it includes a range of rich digital commerce features that work straight out-of-the-box. Fundamentally, the MATRIXX solution delivers operational autonomy to telcos, eliminating the insidious stranglehold of legacy vendors. Gone are the six-month delays for vendor custom feature development, hidden change-request costs, lost market opportunity and the ensuing friction between the telco’s technology, commercial and leadership teams.

On-boarding in minutes, new offers launched in hours/days and a new and compelling customer experience, driving increased NPS and reduced churn will become the new norm.

Figure 1: MATRIXX Solution’s Functional Capabilities

The vast majority of charging and billing vendors make money through building custom solutions via large services organizations. With business models based on 70–80% or more of total revenue from these services, these vendors are only profitable through consistent change-request projects. Their initial offering consists of a development framework, often positioned with a small number of prototype use cases that are “lab test” quality rather than production ready.

History has shown that, as soon as any adaptation or change is required to these use cases, it can take months of development effort via change requests before they can be made operationally live, leading to delay, frustration and lost opportunity. This often manifests itself most vividly in proof-of-concept trials, where telcos request examples of use cases to be adapted and delivered at short notice. The MATRIXX solution allows for these to be configured and demonstrated within 24 hours.

Legacy vendors with development framework approaches fail to deliver.

The TALLENCE Framework

One of the significant challenges in converged charging engine migration is the need to align and integrate customized configurations. Over the years, charging engines have been tailored to meet specific business needs and comply with regulatory requirements. These customized settings, business rules and data models pose a significant challenge when migrating to a new system. The process demands a thorough understanding of both the existing and new charging engines.

Customer data is the lifeblood of any telecommunications business, and ensuring a smooth transition without compromising data integrity is of utmost importance. However, migrating vast amounts of customer data between charging engines presents its own set of complexities. Data formats, structures and mappings often vary between systems, necessitating extensive data transformation, validation and cleansing processes. Maintaining accuracy, consistency and data privacy throughout the migration process is paramount.

The TALLENCE framework provides a powerful solution to simplify the migration of customer data between charging engines. It has been developed and refined over several years, combining a Domain Specific Language (DSL) with extensive experience in business and regulatory requirements specific to the telco environment.

Figure 2: High Level Architecture of the TALLENCE Migration Framework

At the heart of the framework lies a highly adaptable Domain Specific Language (DSL) designed to translate data from different formats into one another. This DSL covers complex workflows, enabling the implementation of multi-stage process steps during translation and robust error-handling processes. The TALLENCE DSL serves as the foundation for the entire migration process, enabling efficient and accurate data transformation between charging engines.

By utilizing the DSL, the framework facilitates the translation of customer data from the legacy vendor data models into the MATRIXX Software data model. The DSL's flexibility and extensibility allow for seamless adaptation to various charging engine migration scenarios, accommodating diverse business requirements and data structures.

Implementing the framework brings several tangible benefits to telcos undergoing charging engine migration.
By automating standard tasks and leveraging the DSL for data transformation, the framework significantly reduces typical project duration costs by an average of 40%. This time and cost reduction is achieved through the automation of repetitive tasks and the elimination of manual data handling, ensuring a more efficient migration process.

Furthermore, the framework minimizes the complexity and risk associated with a charging engine migration. Its comprehensive approach and integration capabilities allow for robust testing, reducing the chances of disruption to existing processes and ensuring smooth data flow across systems. By providing a binding timeline, the framework helps manage the complexity of the overall migration and mitigates the risk of delays in dependent transformation projects.

Case Study

A prominent telecom provider with a large, historically evolved ecosystem sought to migrate from their legacy charging engine to a more advanced and agile solution. Their main operational goal was to simplify and reduce the complexity of their BSS systems by migrating away from a legacy charging vendor and standardizing on a common, advanced single monetization plane — the MATRIXX solution — for B2C, B2B and other services. They partnered with MATRIXX Software and TALLENCE to upscale their monetization strategy and implement the framework to deliver a seamless migration. The TALLENCE DSL enabled efficient data transformation and workflow optimization, ensuring compatibility with the new charging engine. By leveraging the framework's automation capabilities, the organization achieved a reduction in project duration by 40%, resulting in significant cost savings. The streamlined migration process minimized disruptions to client services, leading to high customer satisfaction and retention rates.

Next Steps

The MATRIXX Software and TALLENCE migration framework has been proven to deliver significant benefits in critical telco monetization transformation projects. As timeline pressures mount on telcos to instantiate converged charging migration projects, a recommended next step is a MATRIXX/TALLENCE-led workshop that reviews the current legacy deployment, surround interfaces, systems and data models and advises on possible migration approaches and benefits.

// Contact

Alexander Clausius

  • Lead "Digital Products"

About MATRIXX Software

MATRIXX Software delivers a modern converged charging and commerce solution proven at scale. Its cloud native Digital Commerce Platform provides network-grade, mission critical software that unlocks new network monetization opportunities. With its no-code configuration capabilities, MATRIXX empowers service providers with the agility necessary to easily develop, deploy and monetize new products and services. MATRIXX is the platform of choice powering many of the world’s leading communications companies, IoT players and emerging network infrastructure providers. MATRIXX makes it possible to harness commercial innovation and on-demand customer experience to better compete and drive new revenue and growth opportunities across markets and verticals. matrixx.com