With the current economic climate, wireless operators face shrinking marketing budgets and reduced consumer spending. They need to differentiate their offerings and spend less money attracting new customers in favor of retaining their base. Taking a customer-centric approach to marketing, servicing and billing is a key element to maintaining margins in this challenging economic downturn.

Yarkoni: Virtualizing data costs less than new systems.

To date, most wireless operators have treated prepaid and postpaid subscribers as two separate segments. The speed at which operators have looked to migrate to a converged prepaid and postpaid billing model varies greatly by geography and continues to be a slow evolution, especially in North America.

With budgets tightening across households and businesses, operators need to accelerate the capabilities of offering multiple payment channels to their subscribers. By enabling subscribers to pay for services using a combination of payment channels increases flexibility for subscribers who need to reduce or better control their monthly expenses. This is especially important across the teenager and college student segments, as well as the elderly who are historically more credit-sensitive and want safeguards to limit spending.

Converging prepaid and postpaid can enable family plans where parents are postpaid but their children or grandparents are prepaid. The combined accounts are linked together for greater flexibility and allow the operator to treat that family as one set of customers with multiple payment channels.

Accomplishing that vision requires significant changes to an operator’s billing and prepaid infrastructure, which up until now has been completely separate. Many billing vendors are offering converged billing systems that can handle this to varying degrees. However, the cost of deploying these new systems and the disruption to day-to-day operations has made this an undesirable path for most operators – especially during a market downturn. Instead, operators want to leverage what is already there and working, which requires them to find ways to connect the underlying systems together.

VIRTUALLY THERE
The most viable and cost-effective solution is to “virtualize” the data silos found across the prepaid and postpaid systems to create a unified view of subscribers across both payment channels. A Tier 1 mobile operator in North America is currently readying the deployment of an intelligent data grid to virtualize its data. This project will allow it to leave its prepaid and postpaid systems untouched, but connect them in such a way that any given subscriber can be viewed holistically across both payment channels.

In essence, this operator is deploying a unified subscriber data store that can provide information to many other applications beyond prepaid and billing. For instance, the data held in this intelligent data grid can be used to provide valuable usage statistics which can drive a number of promotional campaigns. For example the operator could keep track of how many text messages a given subscriber sends in a month and give them 10 free messages when they hit 100.

Such promotional programs can be invaluable in driving customer satisfaction. An operator also can accelerate the launch of new services since it can use the data held in this unified data store as a centralized information repository. If that operator wanted to launch a location-based information service, it could use the subscriber data held in this intelligent data grid instead of having to recreate another data store just for that application. The challenge is to make sure the unified data store is scalable enough to handle an increased workload.

By taking advantage of the latest technologies in cloud computing and data virtualization, operators can leverage existing infrastructure systems to extend the data held in their various application silos.

Prepaid and postpaid systems are prime examples of areas that has been often too costly to connect in order to offer subscribers greater payment flexibility.

By virtualizing their respective data, operators can create a unified subscriber data store which in turn gives them greater creativity in combining payment channels and also provides subscriber data to many other value-added services.

Yarkoni is the CEO of Xeround, an intelligent data grid software company based in Bellevue, WA.