Whale Cloud | Elastic Charging Platform

Overview

ZSmart Elastic Charging Platform (ECP), also known as Online Charging System (OCS) is a cloud-native, full-convergent, and 5G-ready charging platform to enable real-time charging, credit control and policy control.

Compliant with 3GPP and TM Forum Open API specifications, ECP is designed with auto scalability to enable large-scale 5G deployments and exponential rise of connected devices and applications, allowing Communication Service Providers (CSPs) to monetize innovative 5G NSA & SA use cases from the very beginning.

Benefits

Fast rollout of 5G service

3GPP standard compliant capability, 5G NSA/SA charging functionalities and proven 5G use cases empower CSPs to deliver innovative 5G offers to customers and monetize 5G use cases quickly.

Reduced TCO

Our low code, configurable, easy-to-use and intuitive charging platform boosts innovation by reducing the time and cost of taking products to market.

Accelerated TTM

Abundant OOTB & Industry proven features and extensive delivery experiences ensure accelerated TTM of new ECP stack with the least impact on surrounding systems, and help iterate new businesses easily on the same platform.

Better customer experience

ECP enhances your customer experience by delivering real-time and personalized service usage, inquiries, notifications, and recommendations. With the parametertized tariff plans, it enables the engagement channels to provide “Build Your Package” feature for customers.

Features

Multi-dimension charging to monetize 5G business cases

Compliant with 3GPP R16, ECP is 5G NSA/SA ready for rapid deployment of 5G services. With the multi-dimension charging capability, it allows CSPs to innovate products and offers of differentiated speed, latency, bandwidth or service.

Multi-dimensional convergence adapting to business strategies

ECP is fully convergent across all offerings, segments, and business models on the same platform, which is highly adaptive to CSPs’ business strategies and helps create synergy among different lines of business with innovative service bundles.

Rich out-of-the-box business features

Benefiting from global operations, ECP provides abundant out-of-the-box features, such as roam like home, data rollover, family sharing, and emergency credit. The ever-evolving business features enable CSPs to continuously deliver innovation with little lead time.

Parameterized pricing to shorten the time to market

Parameterized pricing shortens the time-to-market of new offers into minutes. Instead of configuring plenty of similar tariff plans, a common tariff schema containing preset parameters could be configured to fit all the new offers of a similar structure. The business users are able to launch a new offer quickly by simply keying in new values for the preset tariff parameters.

Graphical wizard for rule-based tariff configuration

The graphical wizard allows CSPs’ product teams to configure tariff plans intuitively in a drag-and-drop mode, and to test the tariff before being published. Charging rules are embedded into the tariff plans, which are reusable and easy-to-manage. Additionally, powerful script-based extension capabilities are embedded to help innovate more complex charging scenarios.

Cloud-native, hardware & hypervisor agnostic charging platform

Following the microservices and cloud native principles, ECP is a hardware & hypervisor agnostic charging platform, enabling scalability per application to ensure the desired level of performance, and flexibility and automation for deployments in all mainstream public cloud environment.

Multi-level openness and well established API first strategy

TM Forum-compliant APIs unleash platform capabilities via standard, open and secure APIs for agile integration instead of proprietary protocols. ECP pushes the near real-time data to analytics and billing platform, allowing CSPs to trigger personalized promotions that cater for customer preferences, and ensuring customers are accessing the very recent consumption information.

Agile devOps & canary release for zero service downtime

ZSmart Cloud Manager (ZCM), as a key component of ECP, constructs CI/CD capabilities to realize agile business iteration and reduced version delivery cost. By implementing canary release, the test & upgrade could be automated with zero service interruption. ZCM also shows performance indicators and triggers alarms on graphical interfaces and dashboard to improve the maintenance efficiency.

Built-in resilience to ensure carrier-grade reliability and availability

Stateless charging processes are deployed in cluster docker containers managed by Kubernetes. The docker cluster load balance control and self-healing of applications construct the local redundancy for applications, eliminating potential single point of errors. For Geographic Redundancy, OCS also brings active-active Geographic Disaster Recovery (GDR) architecture to ensure no service interruption and degradation from any physical and logic disasters.

Multi-dimension charging to monetize 5G business cases

Multi-dimensional convergence adapting to business strategies

Rich out-of-the-box business features

Parameterized pricing to shorten the time to market

Graphical wizard for rule-based tariff configuration

Cloud-native, hardware & hypervisor agnostic charging platform

Multi-level openness and well established API first strategy

Agile devOps & canary release for zero service downtime

Built-in resilience to ensure carrier-grade reliability and availability

Business Scenarios

Quick 5G deployment

As CSPs plan to scale up 5G services in a way that is cost-effective and makes the most use of their legacy 4G services with the least impact, ECP is the perfect match that supports both 4G and 5G services, enabling quick 5G deployment to stay momentum.

Business Scenarios

Quick 5G deployment

Fast rollout of digital brand

To better satisfy and hold onto the digital-native generations, many CSPs are turning to the digital brand strategy. ECP, with its standard open APIs and abundant out-of-the-box business features, is a highly desirable solution for the fast rollout and quick-win of digital brand.

Unified charging across multiple lines of business

Improving customer satisfaction is a key driver for deploying a fully convergent system. ECP helps set up a more agile and unified charging system to support multiple lines of business including fixed and mobile broadband, prepaid and postpaid services, consumer and business segments.

Case & Story

Merging Into Future - Case Study of Hutch Sri Lanka BSS Transformation

Whale Cloud delivers a modernized digital BSS suite in Hutch Sri Lanka, consolidating its legacy stacks within 8 months, meeting the extremely tight deadline for the post-M&A business strategy.

MTN Rwanda Gains a Quick Win for Going Digital

Whale Cloud helps MTN Rwanda deploy the latest cloud native BSS stack within 14 months, allowing the operator to accelerate its transformation journey with enhanced customer experience and increased revenue streams.

A Latin American Operator Achieves a Quick Win for Full Stack Digital BSS

A Latin American operator goes live successfully within 10 months with Whale Cloud's full-stack BSS suite, speeding up its digital journey with exceptional customer experience.