Redknee and Microsoft Alliance

The Microsoft and Redknee alliance brings about a transformation in the telecom billing space by providing an expanded and pre-integrated software solution to communication service providers. Redknee’s Turnkey Converged Billing (TCB) solution provides faster time-to-market for new services, improved business decision making through advanced reporting and analytics, and lower total cost of ownership. Redknee’s TCB utilizes the flexible tools and technology within Microsoft Dynamics CRM, SQL Server 2012, and Windows Server 2008, to bring to market one of the industry’s most comprehensive, real-time converged billing solutions - helping service providers to better understand, segment, and market to their subscriber base and deliver real-time transaction capabilities and customer usage data across their organizations.

Solutions

Alliance

Customers

Resources

Turnkey Converged Billing

Redknee TCB with Microsoft Dynamics CRM combines converged billing and revenue management capabilities with integrated sales force automation and marketing tools to help service providers increase revenue and capitalize on new opportunities. Because Redknee Turnkey Converged Billing with Microsoft Dynamics CRM is based on an open architecture that seamlessly integrates with core network elements, service providers can accomplish the transition from legacy billing systems with minimal disruption. This integrated, end-to-end solution covers a full spectrum of real-time billing, customer care, and enterprise CRM capabilities, along with consolidated customer information, so that service providers can offer a seamless experience to subscribers. With SQL Server 2012, Redknee TCB is proven to be scalable to 250 million subscribers. Conducted at the Microsoft Partner Solution Center with Intel, NEC and X-IO, this benchmark test achieved the largest scalability results reported in the telecoms sector today, while meeting significant performance and cost efficiency requirements for Tier 1 service providers. Some of the key benefits to the solution include:

Real-time billing capabilities enhanced with robust CRM functionality
Faster time-to-market for new services
Carrier grade, Tier-1 market-leading scalability with SQL 2012
Improved business decision making through advanced reporting and analytics
Lower total cost of ownership and ease of use
Extensive customer management and sales and marketing tools

Increase Revenue with New Monetization Opportunities

Improve average revenue per user, derive more value from the network, and increase the ability to monetize each transaction and service that goes across your network. Redknee TCB with Microsoft Dynamics CRM empowers operators to consolidate real-time data from across your business and provide the tools your organization needs to segment markets intelligently. Act rapidly on insights and expand and tailor service offerings and rate plans, helping to increase usage and the uptake of services. The resulting 360-degree view of customers and services helps increase opportunities for impulse purchases and upselling from virtually anywhere, including retail outlets, the customer care center, self-care portals, and mobile devices.

Create Differentiated Customer Experiences

Deliver differentiated customer experiences that treat each customer like a unique individual. Redknee Turnkey Converged Billing with Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides access to powerful business intelligence gained through historical and real-time customer usage data and subscriber profiles. Such knowledge helps you better understand subscribers and quickly launch personalized communications, and promotions tailored to your subscriber base. These offers and touch points foster a personal connection that can lead to greater customer loyalty, which helps set you apart from the competition. Powerful sales and marketing functionality along with an integrated agent desktop help you target offers and reduce churn, call-handling time, and agent training.

Agility Out of the Box

Redknee Turnkey Converged Billing with Microsoft Dynamics CRM helps service providers control the cost of customer acquisition and customer service, as well as capital, operating, and other expenditures. This enables you to manage any service across any access technology and support all payment types—prepaid, postpaid, or a hybrid. Because it is a converged and fully integrated solution, service providers can implement it far faster than competing solutions and break free from the burden of time-consuming integration and customization of business critical systems. This means service providers can bring to market and capitalize on services and products and provide integrated offerings more quickly.

Redknee has extensive experience with solution conversion (moving from an outdated billing platform to the joint Redknee/ Microsoft solution), with results that speak for themselves:

Total Project Cost is <50% of industry average.
100% success rate in conversions.
Converted customers experience resulted in a >25% average growth in their customer base.
Business Processes adapted to Redknee solution within 6 months.
Full solution can be deployed in less than 14 weeks (typical deployments take many months- or even years)

Benchmark Results Equal High Performance and Low Cost

Thanks to its full integration with Microsoft SQL Server 2012, Redknee’s converged billing solution brings a high performance platform with significant cost reductions.

When tested at 250 million subscribers, Redknee’s converged billing processed 9.8 billion call detail records (CDRs) in one day. On average this means that 113,400 CDRs were processed per second, providing a platform that will meet the requirements to manage the expected exponential increase of mobile data traffic due to the rise of mobile-connected tablet PCs and the rise of machine-to-machine offerings.

Our hardware and technology partnerships have already resulted in significant achievements, with a proven reduction in hardware and software costs of 50% for our billing and customer care solution and the largest scalability test in the telecoms industry. As a group we are able to deliver a much more cost-efficient product to the market, proving that a Redknee solution with partners that include Microsoft, NEC, Intel and X-IO can support the volumes of the largest communications service providers and meet their cost-efficiency requirements.

The tests, designed to simulate the requirements of a typical Tier-1 communications service provider, also included NEC Express5800/A1080a scalable servers, three high performance X-IO Hyper ISEs with a hybrid HDD and SSD solution for the databases and indices, and a X-IO HDD-based ISE 19.2 solution for transaction logs.

Estimations have found that the cost of the database hardware, software, storage and maintenance fees was calculated to be less than 1 cent per subscriber. This is attributed to:

Lower hardware costs: SQL Server 2012 runs on Intel Xeon processor -based server hardware, which can dramatically lower the total cost of ownership (TCO) for customers.
Lower software costs: The list price of SQL Server, including critical features such as high availability, disaster recovery, and data compression, is a third of the largest competitor’s licensing costs, resulting in as much as 70% reduction in database license costs, compared to the license costs of other leading database providers
Simpler systems management and lower staffing costs: SQL Server database administrators (DBAs) can typically manage four times as many physical databases as competitors’ DBAs, leading to an estimated 460 percent difference in annual cost of administration per database.
Lower maintenance costs: SQL Server first-year maintenance costs are up to 77% less than those of the largest competitor.
Lower storage costs: Storage costs can be dramatically reduced through SQL Server compression and X-IO Hyper ISE technology, which combines Solid State Drives (SSDs) and Hard Disk Drives (HDDs), resulting in up to 80% reduction in storage space through compression.

The Microsoft and Redknee alliance brings about a transformation in the telecom billing space by providing an expanded and pre-integrated software solution to communication service providers. Redknee’s Turnkey Converged Billing (TCB) solution provides faster time-to-market for new services, improved business decision making through advanced reporting and analytics, and lower total cost of ownership. Redknee’s TCB utilizes the flexible tools and technology within Microsoft Dynamics CRM, SQL Server 2012, BizTalk Server 2009, and Windows Server 2008, to bring to market one of the industry’s most comprehensive, real-time converged billing solutions - helping service providers to better understand, segment, and market to their subscriber base and deliver real-time transaction capabilities and customer usage data across their organizations.

Betsy Pridmore, Director Application Platform at Microsoft commented: “As networks, devices and applications continue to feed into the data explosion, communications service providers need to assess how their systems are not only able to manage today’s needs but are ready for tomorrow’s challenges. The expanding relationship between Redknee and Microsoft will deliver communications service providers across the world with unparalleled cloud ready, mission critical business insights to empower our customers to make data-driven decisions for the road ahead.”

Karl Whitelock, Senior Consulting Analyst for OSS/BSS Global Competitive Strategies at Stratecast stated:

“The announcement between Redknee and Microsoft is an alignment of the offerings of Redknee TCB and Microsoft Dynamics CRM for addressing the market with an integrated CRM and billing solution. To maintain customer satisfaction, real-time rating & charging must be tightly integrated with customer care in all forms including live agents, IVR, and/or web portals. Such solutions must also address collaboration needs involving both retail services and wholesale content partners for maximum cost benefit and ease in working with customers.”

Established in 1999, Redknee's revenue generating solutions provide advanced converged billing, rating, customer care, charging and policy for voice, messaging and next generation data services to more than 90 network operators in over 50 countries.

“Redknee’s TCB Solution met our tight timeframe for deployment and offered the right combination of a proven, cost effective and efficient architecture, while providing an evolutionary path to address future needs, including new multi-media and mobile-payment services.” - Mr. Michael R. Carroll, Acting CEO for Botswana Telecommunications

Redknee and Microsoft have secured multiple billing transformation deals since the alliance was announced at Mobile World Congress 2010. Operators have been impressed by the collaboration between the two leading solution providers, which has resulted in fast growing companies selecting Redknee’s Turnkey Converged Billing, with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, for their billing transformation projects. DST, a leading mobile operator based in APAC, is one of the latest operators to select Redknee to lead their transformation projects as they launch next generation services to their customers.

Idris T Vasi, CEO of DST Group stated:

“We selected Redknee due to its strong capabilities in converged billing and customer care. As a leader in this space, we see our relationship with Redknee as a long term strategic partnership as we transform our networks and technologies.”- February 2011

Lucas Skoczkowski, Redknee’s CEO stated:

“We are pleased to be working operators, such as DST, as they embark on their transformation projects to support the launch of their next generation networks and services. Our partnership

with Microsoft is growing and Redknee continues to increase its market share through its focus on real-time monetization solutions to support the growth of data content for wireless and fixed subscribers around the world.”

Doug Kennedy, vice president, Microsoft Dynamics Partners stated:

“Service providers are increasingly looking to transform their operations and business models to deliver new services to market faster and at a lower cost. Microsoft Dynamics offers flexible and scalable solutions that partners such as Redknee can customize to enable service providers to reduce time to market for new offerings, improve the subscriber experience and ultimately monetize high-value services at a time of increased competitive pressures and tightening margins.”

Microsoft and Redknee Alliance