IIR recently held its 15th Annual Billing and Information Management Systems (BIMS) conference in Amsterdam, with a full-packed program that included presentations and speeches from service providers, vendors and TM Forum representatives.
Joanie Tonkinson, manager of Customer Billing Services for Sprint/Nextel highlighted the importance of aligning KPI measurement with business priorities.
TM Forum's Tony Poulos handled the real-time benchmarking session, which enabled delegates to learn key insights from real-time voting results. Out of the 300 people attending the session, 130 were equipped with wireless input devices, through which 88% indicated they believed KPIs were valuable in running an efficient BSS operation, and 54% had actually developed their own KPIs.
Telcordia's Pat McCarthy led the Real-Time Charging and Marketing stream, using a detailed presentation by Telcordia customer NTT DoCoMo. In the same stream, Hong Kong's CSL demonstrated how high volumes could also be handled with near-real-time views of charges by polling for CDRs every 15 minutes, raw rating them and having the details available for customer view within 30 minutes.
In the payments session, Dave Birch from Consult Hyperion highlighted that NFC was not just about payments, saying P2P was potentially a very large market because of the simplicity in payments fostered by NFC technology.
Eric Troup, platform strategy advisor for Microsoft's Telecoms Business Unit, outlined the strategy for implementing innovative, service-centric delivery platforms.
Henk Ensing of the Netherland's TNO - a government-initiated research and consulting group - summarized the evolution of billing from network-centric to customer-centric environments, where multiple parties cooperate for delivery of online products.
Download the full report of the event below.
Highlights from the 15th Annual Billing and Information Management Systems Conference