Taking a service-oriented approach
Peter-Service has developed a new architecture for its solutions.
Billing transformation at MegaFon is arguably the largest project ever undertaken by Peter-Service. To help one of Russia’s biggest telcos consolidate its billing, Peter-Service is adopting the latest advances and innovations in technology, centering the project around an overhaul of its product line driven by a service-oriented approach.
The telecom industry has come to a realization of the fact that all-in-one platforms and monolithic solutions are a thing of the past, shifting towards a modular architecture in which each “chunk” is responsible for a specific function. The key advantage of a module-based design is greater flexibility and quality of service.
“Our market segment is steadily advancing efforts to create tools that would allow more flexibility in loyalty management and a greater level of personalization. Our customers expect us to implement this approach in our solutions,” comments Igor Gorkov, Peter-Service’s Managing Director. “We are currently working on a lot of new specialized products intended to cover some of the functions normally performed by a billing system but more geared towards providing specific services.”
For example, if you look at PETER-SERVICE BIS, a traditional billing system developed by Peter-Service, you will see that it covers four big functionality areas – CRM, order management, product management and billing. In the new architecture, they are unbundled and implemented as standalone products grouped by domains.
“Every company, in one way or another, aims to follow industry-wide standards, aligning its efforts with a generally accepted structure of domains. We are not an exception; we have always been committed to incorporating the latest advances into our solutions. So, when we were invited by MegaFon to work on a billing transformation project, we were well prepared,” points out Alexander Bobrov, Production Projects Manager at Peter-Service. “Undoubtedly, the future is in service-oriented products that will be fitted together by telcos like jigsaws based on their actual needs and demands. When you deal with a monolithic solution, it is more difficult to tailor it to customers’ specific needs; but if you have smaller standalone units that can be put together in any combinations and still be able to interact via pre-defined protocols, everything becomes much easier.”
In developing the new architecture, the functionality of the BSS system was broken down into high-level domains, with individual features being unbundled into separate components. Each component is a complete solution that can run on its own, even when other components are fully or partially unavailable. The adopted structure of domains and components is based on TMForum's eTOM, TAM and SID.
To bring greater flexibility into projects involving the deployment of complex solutions, the core of the new BSS architecture consists of a set of integration components that allow interactions between domains via an enterprise service bus (OpenAPI_ESB). The bus becomes the integration layer between front-end customer care functions and the billing core, payment processing server and address servers. It is open to third-party developers, ensuring smooth integration of Peter-Service products into any infrastructure.
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