Billing software is playing an increasingly important role for telecom carriers, according to a new report from a Bethesda, Maryland-based research firm.

 

Officials at Dittberner Associates say that billing today not only assures service revenue, but facilitates conversations with customers. According to the firm’s 289-page, $5,000 report, “The Telecom Billing & Charging Market,” the global telecom billing and charging market will expand from $6 billion in 2007 (see chart breaking down billing by application, below) to $7.6 billion in 2012.

 

Dan Baker, the research director at Dittberner’s OSS/BSS KnowledgeBase, a market research service, says that billing in the telecom market includes pre-paid IN charging, real-time convergent charging, postpaid billing and billing for interconnect and content partners.

 

“In the wireless market, for example, billing software is increasingly enabling services such as real-time advise-of-charge, lifestyle packages, content charging, and marketing promotions,” Baker said.

 

The report is designed to help operators: understand market priorities; adopt strategies to become successful; examine which vendors lead in particular market segments; and identify which billing or charging partners might be good matches.

 Dittberner officials say their study includes a qualitative analysis of billing market trends and a quantitative estimate of market size, vendor revenue breakouts, market share and forecasts delivered in software that can be manipulated among charts, tables and Excel reports.

 

One focus of the report, Dittberner officials say, is the wireless merchandising market.

 

“The wireless market is witnessing a bewildering array of new services and marketing initiatives that are enabled by the billing system,” officials with the firm say. “The report profiles which billers lead in this important category and discusses the impact of new initiatives such as life style and enterprise marketing.”

 

In a section on “Unified Billing and Product Catalogs,” the report examines large carriers who want to reuse their billing assets and promotions across regions, business units and technologies. The report examines what benefits unified catalogs could bring and the challenges catalogs pose to vendors and carriers.

The report also examines the global expansion of telecom as a positive for interconnect traffic.

 

“Now, carriers are investing in interconnect billing and full-blown ‘interconnect management systems’ that monitor contracts, track fast-moving prices, and do settlements,” Dittberner officials say. “Here the report provides details on the innovative Telarix interconnect and Amdocs (News - Alert) content partner management systems.”