Whale Cloud | Convergent Billing System

Overview

ZSmart Convergent Billing System (cvBS) is a cloud-native compact BSS solution to provide end-to-end support to the mobile business of CSPs. This best-of-suite solution is designed with a unified data model, centralized product catalog, a converged charging engine and unified API management for all networks, services, channels and payment methods, which can navigate CSPs through the digital transformation quickly with a low cost and in the meantime deliver the best-in-class customer experience.

Benefits

Faster time-to-market

With parameterized pricing and ready-to-use use cases, CSPs can launch new products, campaigns and innovations with much faster speed.

Easier operation and maintenance

One unified and convergent system with unified data model reduces the system complexity, lowers the integration difficulty, and brings higher system operability.

Lower TCO

Compared with the best-of-breed solution, the best-of-suite solution can save more than 20% TCO.

Features

Transform your business with a convergent and unified system

cvBS adopts consolidated and convergent design which significantly reduces the TCO and O&M cost. With a centralized product catalog, CSPs can manage products for all customer segments, either prepaid or postpaid. A convergent charging engine enables CSPs to perform online and offline charging with a consistent set of charging rules. The unified data model eliminates the data inconsistencies between multiple applications such as customer care, charging and billing.

Ready to monetize the 5G new business

cvBS is a 5G NSA/SA ready solution that enables you to monetize the 5G business quickly for B2C model, and B2B and B2B2X models with extensions added. It follows the latest 3GPP standard and supports service-based architecture (SBA) and service-based interface (SBI) to support multi-dimension charging and network slice monetization with a flexible and configurable charging engine.

Price new offers in minutes with parameterized pricing

With the parameterized pricing feature, CSPs are liberated from configuring plenty of similar price plans for new offers. Instead, a common tariff schema containing preset tariff parameters could be configured to fit all new offers of a similar structure. Meanwhile, business users are able to price a new offer quickly and simply by just keying in the values for those preset tariff parameters.

Make things easier with OOTB functionality

To shorten the time-to-market, cvBS provides plentiful out-of-the-box features, presets abundant ready-to-use use cases and offer samples based on decades of Whale Cloud’s best practices in projects around the globe.

Digitalize your customer experience

As a suite solution, cvBS helps design the end-to-end customer experience across the whole customer journey throughout the buying, using, billing, payment and dunning stages. Plus ZSmart Consumer Lifestyle Platform (CLP), a consumer super app suite, it helps deliver digital-native customer experience featuring personalized, interactive, real-time, convenient and humanized customer journey.

Deploy and optimize the system as you need

cvBS is a cloud native system which can be deployed on public cloud, private cloud or on premise. With a micro-service architecture and open APIs specifications, It allows CSPs to choose the add-on modules based on their requirements. With stateless applications, CSPs can easily scale out and in dynamically to fit business needs.

Enable high performance with an optimized architecture

The optimized billing process and the adoption of memory database significantly improves the system performance. ZSmart Real-time Billing (RTB) uses event-driven mode instead of the traditional batch task mode, which decentralizes billing into the daily jobs executed automatically, significantly decreasing the billing duration. Meanwhile, by storing the key business data in memory, cvBS makes distinct improvement on the performance of billing applications.

Avoid revenue leakage from multiple dimensions

cvBS presets various types of audit themes in order to minimize any revenue risks. Moreover, it has an embedded credit control mechanism which will be continuously updated based on customer behaviors such as consumption amount and one-time payment. Customers’ credit limit, debit allowances and dunning strategies are inter-correlated to mitigate arrears risks, forming a closed revenue assurance loop.

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

For Geographic Redundancy, cvBS also brings active-active Geographic Disaster Recovery (GDR) architecture to ensure no service interruption and degradation from any physical and logic disasters. Stateless cvBS applications 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.

Agile DevOps & canary release for zero service downtime

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

Transform your business with a convergent and unified system

Ready to monetize the 5G new business

Price new offers in minutes with parameterized pricing

Make things easier with OOTB functionality

Digitalize your customer experience

Deploy and optimize the system as you need

Enable high performance with an optimized architecture

Avoid revenue leakage from multiple dimensions

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

Agile DevOps & canary release for zero service downtime

Business Scenarios

Merge multiple business systems into one unified solution

More and more CSPs choose to deploy a unified system to support their diversified business such as prepaid and postpaid, individual and enterprise, etc. It reduces the integration cost of multiple systems and eliminates the potential data synchronization issues. The centralized configuration and management reduce the O&M cost and enable new convergent business modes such as hybrid service and bundle offers.

Quick 5G deployment

Many CSPs are actively deploying 5G to acquire more high-value customers and new revenue streams. A mature 5G solution may help CSPs crack the new market fast and continuously launch new businesses. cvBS is a 5G ready solution and has been proven by multiple top CSPs. It can perfectly match the 5G roadmap of CSPs and help CSPs develop 5G quickly and gradually.

Merge multiple business systems into one unified solution

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. cvBS plus ZSmart Consumer Lifestyle Platform (CLP), a digitalized end-to-end solution with abundant ready-to-use business use cases, is the optimal solution for the fast rollout of a digital brand with lower costs.

Merge multiple business systems into one unified solution