There used to be a strong silo between pre- and postpaid biz models in telecom, and there still exists debate about how charging should be implemented for the cloud. Many CSPs have strategies for convergent charging that involve intelligent networks with prepaid elements, whereas others come to convergence from the postpaid billing side.
Isomi says both are "difficult paths" for flexibility. He believes mediation environments are the ideal place for integrating data to any system. "It's second nature to mediation systems at this point and so cloud is a natural for mediation systems to foster the necessary flexibility."
Another important factor will be recognition of network, load and balance management - all of which connect directly to revenue in cloud services. "In the past, those elements had no bearing on what would be charged; that changes with the cloud," notes Behan. "If a person downloading a movie or playing an MMOG will use a disproportionate amount of bandwidth than someone reading an online newspaper, you want to charge more for the CPU-intensive services in the cloud."
For these reasons, multi-dimensional rating will be necessary to understand multiple parameters at one time, as traffic passes through servers.
"Information about the number of users and CPU power being consumed can all come to play in one event. Amdocs' Hilton agrees that mediation will, therefore, have a more important role.
"It will sit directly in the network to extract information from the cloud and pass it to billing (i.e., information about QoS analysis during a session or information about resources utilized and resources not utilized, or usage times and volumes to billing systems)."
Other formidable challenges will be moving applications smoothly between service provider infrastructure and that of third parties like Amazon's EC2. Policy management will be a major factor, as will tying it to rating and data discovery functions that meet cloud computing demands. Additionally, contracts and settlement capabilities, and dispute resolution will be a different beast altogether.
The needs for real-time usage monitoring and real-time policy management, metering, bundling, discounting and management of cross-product discounting will give CSPs no choice but to adopt a unified approach to BSS, which will sit firmly in the network - to the level of call/session control.