BT taps Openet to extend Real-time Charging and include EE Mobile

Openet, a provider of Digital BSS solutions, has been selected by BT Group to provide real-time charging services for BT Mobile and EE Mobile. Openet has been supplying its Evolved Charging Suite to BT Mobile for a number of years.

BT has now taken the decision, as part of a wider IT modernisation and cost reduction programme, to deploy Openet’s advanced, cloud native iteration, Evolved Charging Suite 7.0 to EE Mobile. This will see the real-time capability and service that Openet has established for BT Mobile expanded to support EE.

BT’s decision to extend Openet’s involvement in its network operations was taken amidst its ongoing digital transformation journey. The operator has publicly stated its intention to dramatically reduce its reliance on legacy IT systems and the number of stacks it has within its macro network to achieve overall cost savings of £2 billion.

BT is actively replacing legacy with systems that are cloud-native, real-time, fully configurable and use API-rich data services. This major technological overhaul is intended to rapidly reduce its time to market for launching new services (from 15 months to 3 months), configure BT’s extensive product catalogue and provide the added elasticity to meet the anticipated signalling demands of 5G.

“We have been an Openet customer for a while and knew what to expect in terms of its technological leadership and attentive service in helping us swap out our incumbent providers. We are excited by realising the potential of our new approach to service delivery and monetisation for EE Mobile,” says Damian Brennan, IT B2C - Director of Solutions Development, BT.

“We’re absolutely delighted to be extending the deployment of our cloud-native Evolved Charging Suite in BT to cover BT Mobile and EE Mobile,” says Niall Norton, CEO at Openet. “BT Group fully understands the significant efficiency gains and cost savings that can be made by embracing cloud-native technology, especially as they look to add scale in anticipation of 5G. The levels of cost saving that BT is targeting really underlines the inflexibility of legacy systems and the need for a new approach. To be viewed as an architect of change by one of the world’s leading operators, is truly humbling.”