Netcracker Unveils Cloud-Based Online Charging System

Netcracker Technology has unveiled its Cloud-Based Online Charging System (OCS), a next-generation offering that has been optimized to meet the new age requirements of the digital world.

An always-active OCS platform, Netcracker's Cloud-Based OCS addresses all of the key pain points associated with legacy, hardware-based charging systems. Specifically, it enables:

• Always-on availability at a lower cost. Today's digital world requires real-time operations and always-on capabilities. Previous attempts at creating such capabilities through hardware-centric platforms were expensive and unreliable. Netcracker's revolutionary software-based approach to its Cloud OCS reduces hardware dependency, keeps costs down and delivers unparalleled availability and real-time functionality.

• Unparalleled cloud elasticity and scalability in order to keep up with the demands of digitalization. The unpredictable nature of customer preferences, usage and network traffic requires an OCS that can scale on demand and operate across distributed infrastructure. Netcracker's Cloud-Based OCS supports horizontal and vertical scalability across all layers.

• Converged revenue management scenarios. Unlike legacy OCS that focused on specific rating and charging schemes, Netcracker's Cloud-Based OCS enables and supports converged revenue management capabilities across all business lines, including pre-paid and post-paid models for all types of services. It also centralizes storage for all rating, charging, subscriber and policy information onto a single product. This simplified data management and its catalog-driven configurations also means that service providers can lower integration costs and reduce the time it takes to bring new and innovative digital services to market.

• Support for VoLTE, virtualized, 5G and IoT services. The emergence of LTE and 5G has forced service providers to rethink how services are created and delivered. Netcracker's Cloud-Based OCS, with its faster speeds and extremely low latency, creates the ideal platform for service providers to monetize real-time interactive multimedia offerings, such as augmented reality, virtual reality and real-time online games.

• Deployment flexibility across any physical and virtual environment. Netcracker's Cloud-Based OCS' architecture is designed to be deployed and operated in any environment, including physical, any type of cloud (private, public or hybrid) and virtualized infrastructure. This minimizes the reliance on complex, custom-built hardware and lowers total cost of ownership for service providers.

• Embedded analytics. Today's increasingly digitalized world requires an OCS with intelligence and analytic capabilities to launch targeted, personalized and timely offers to customers. Netcracker's Cloud-Based OCS with closed-loop alignment with analytics and campaign management enables service providers to deliver the right offer to the right customer at the right time.

"Netcracker's Cloud-Based OCS underscores the right approach for service providers that are looking to monetize cloud and virtualized services in today's digital world," said Karl Whitelock, Global Director of Operations, Orchestration, Data Analytics and Monetization (ODAM) at Stratecast. "As a software-centric solution that relies on configurable parameters and not complex customized code, Netcracker's scalable OCS can help to address any level of transaction processing need, which is essential for delivering future-proof operations in the journey to becoming true digital services providers."

"Traditional revenue management platforms have not been able to keep pace with the needs of communications service providers as they transform into digital service providers," said Sanjay Mewada, Chief Strategy Officer at Netcracker. "Netcracker has evolved its OCS to address these precise needs. Our Cloud OCS, with its unparalleled elasticity, always-on availability and embedded analytics, removes the barriers to digitalization and allows our customers to rapidly monetize digital offerings, such as VoLTE, 5G, virtualized and IoT services."