Monetizing telco services at scale with real-time billing data

Amdocs is a leading provider of software and services to communications and media companies. With more than 40 years’ experience, it has built relationships with 350 network providers across 85+ countries. Amdocs’ customers include ATT, Telefonica, Vodafone, T-Mobile and other major providers, and its services touch billions of consumers daily. As a trusted technology partner, Amdocs empowers telecommunications companies to provide next-generation communication experiences to both individual end users and enterprise customers.

The challenge of real-time, accurate billing at scale 

Billing is the lifeblood of telecom companies, underpinning exceptional customer experiences and the business’s ability to generate revenue. Real-time usage data, including detailed records of how long sessions last and the amount of mobile data consumed, drives accurate billing. 

In the current age of 5G, billions of usage events are created daily. Telcos need to store, process, and analyze this data securely and at scale to monetize their services effectively and identify new revenue streams. Consumer expectations are behind this scalability challenge; users increasingly demand immediate, personalized billing information – for example, viewing exactly how much a recent session cost and how much data is left on their plan. Providing granular billing means telcos must accurately reconcile usage data at scale and in real-time.

To meet this industry-wide need and facilitate the monetization of telco services, Amdocs offers a product named “Turbo Charging” which is a scalable monetization engine, powered by Cloudera. 

“Cloudera and Amdocs power telcos to optimize revenue management and enable data-driven monetization decisions,” comments Naceur Lagha, Director of Product Management at Amdocs.

Building a flexible and scalable database for Amdocs’ customers

Cloudera provides Amdocs’ telco clients with a secure, highly scalable, and open database to manage usage records. Cloudera is embedded into the Turbo Charging engine to give Amdocs’ customers the flexibility to choose their preferred deployment option, whether it’s on-premises or in a cloud environment such as AWS, Azure, GCP, or Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.  Cloudera always meets the necessary security, governance, and privacy requirements for global industry regulators, regardless of the infrastructure a customer opts for. 

Amdocs combines the data managed by Cloudera with multiple other data sources that enables telco users to extract insights for accurate billing, targeted marketing, and enhanced customer retention. 

Amdocs is also using Apache Kafka to build real-time streaming data pipelines that facilitate rapid decision making. With data streamed in real-time, telco companies using the engine can quickly respond to customer needs and identify changing market trends. 

“With Cloudera, Amdocs offers a market-leading service that is open, scalable, and truly hybrid, so we can adapt to our clients’ data and environment needs,” comments Boaz Rubin, Head of Network Software R&D at Amdocs. 

A leading real-time charging system

Turbo Charging engine instantly processes events according to subscriber profiles, and service offers that apply. This capability enables real-time charging calculations for any type of transaction, so mobile users have nearly instant updates on their balances, whether they are prepaid, postpaid, or hybrid, and leveraging 3G, 4G, or 5G services. All usage records are managed and stored securely for bill generation, further analysis, and future queries, enabling Amdocs customers to create new products and payment plans according to individual users’ needs. 

Amdocs’ Turbo Charging engine is now rated by telco service providers as the best-in-class real-time, converged charging system. Cloudera facilitates the entire billing journey by ingesting network events at scale. Turbo Charging manages billions of events per day from more than a billion subscribers. Compiling usage data in one place means Amdocs’ Turbo Charging engine acts as a single source of truth for telecom companies, instilling the confidence they have the full context and details of every billing event. 

Watch Boaz Rubin, VP and Head of Network Solutions R&D at Amdocs, discuss implementing AI for digital transformation with Cloudera.