Hong Kong-based SmarTone Telecommunications Holdings chose Oracle to transform its Business Support Systems (BSS) and upgrade its legacy solutions.
By bringing prepaid charging and postpaid billing onto one unified, cloud native platform, Oracle Cloud Scale Charging and Billing will enable SmarTone to efficiently launch and scale differentiated offerings.
SmarTone CTO Stephen Chau said the cloud native solution will enable them to improve agility by simplifying operations across consumer and enterprise (B2B) lines of business, accelerating time to market for new offers.
Also, SmarTone expects the solution to support the company’s existing consumer and business offerings with advanced capabilities such as automated billing, real-time tracking, and customisable invoicing.
The Oracle solution is aligned with TM Forum and 3GPP standards and uses an API-first approach to seamlessly integrate with most existing systems such as CRM, payment gateways, self-care, and self-service platforms.
Oracle is tasked to help SmarTone monetise the greater capacity, low latency, and precise geo-location tracking enabled by 5G and also support future business models such as industry-focused IoT offerings.
Support for open APIs will allow such capabilities to be seamlessly integrated into co-created offerings in B2B2x business models.
“5G has enabled endless new service opportunities, but market leaders will be made by their ability to accelerate time to market from conceptualisation to monetisation,” Jason Rutherford, SVP and general manager, Oracle Communications, Applications.
With the Oracle solution, SmarTone expects to be able to efficiently scale to meet its growing customer demand using a private cloud deployment which distributes traffic across two charging sites in active-active mode.
This allows business continuity to be maintained if one site were to go down, as the charging grid can be federated across both sites to maintain sessions and associated revenue or data. This has been recently demonstrated in a performance test for 100 million subscribers with multi-site deployment.
