SAP goes after converged telco billing market

Stuart Corner
Friday, 13 November 2009 09:06

IT Industry - Strategy

Business software giant, SAP, has made its debut in the local market for telco converged billing and charging products with the launch in Australia of the SAP Convergent Charging billing application and the appointment of Mike Robinson as head of Telecommunications, SAP Australia and New Zealand.

SAP's converged charging and billing software was developed by French company, Highdeal, acquired by SAP in June this year. The original development took place in France Telecom's research labs in the late 1990s and Highdeal was spun out as an independent company in 2000.

Glenda Akers, SVP of SAP's telco business unit, told iTWire: "We bought this asset because it represents the new business model for telcos and other industries where everyone is going to try and get a bit of the retail pie. It is extremely fast and it has a patented technology around the way it does rating."

Robinson added: "There have been cases overseas where telcos have found they need one tenth of the hardware to run this compared to their previous systems."  According to Highdeal , " Customers claim that the flexibility provided by Highdeal leads to a cost saving of up to 80 percent."

The product is claimed to "process up to 45,000 transactions per second - four times faster than industry benchmarks, making it easily the most powerful and scalable rating solution available in the market."

Highdeal boasts 200 customers, but Akers said most of the sales had been through OEM agreements with Ericsson, HP and Nokia Siemens Networks. "It is used in Ericsson's multimedia system, and in HP's IN prepaid solutions for voice and data...They also have media companies like AOL as customers, WebEx uses the Highdeal rating and charging component, and it is used in transport and logistics and for parking in Europe."

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