Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management - Datasheet

1 Data Sheet / Oracle Communications

Billing and Revenue Management / Version 0.1

Data Sheet

Oracle Communications

Billing and Revenue

Management

In the face of mounting competition, service providers across

industries including communications, cloud, media, and finance, must

evolve their business models as they deliver innovative services that

enhance their brand value and the overall customer experience.

Billing and Revenue Management

As a key module within Oracle’s Cloud Scale Billing and Cloud Scale Charging

and Billing solutions, Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management

(BRM) is a proven, reliable, and modern billing solution supporting all stages of

the revenue management lifecycle and is foundational to the digital commerce

operations of leading communications and digital service providers.

BRM combines the industry’s most comprehensive functional footprint with a

superior real-time architecture to support any service, industry, and partner-

enabled business model at any scale. Proven in communications, media, cloud

and digital goods and services markets, it is available with both on-premises and

cloud native deployment, allowing service providers to accelerate innovation,

operate more efficiently, and scale as business needs grow.

Image 1. Key functions provided by BRM within Oracle’s Cloud Scale Charging and Billing solution.

Key benefits

Oracle Communications Billing

and Revenue Management

supports all stages of the

revenue management lifecycle

spanning generation, capture,

collection, and analysis. BRM

provides the following key

benefits:

 Rapid time to market for all

new services.

 Support for multiple business

segments and business

models from a single

platform including B2C, B2B,

and B2B2C.

 Gain insight into business

trends based on data

generated by comprehensive

billing operations.

 Accelerate innovation,

operate more efficiently, and

scale as business needs grow

by deploying in cloud native

model to harness cloud

infrastructure and DevOps

CI/CD tooling.

“BRM was selected to

demonstrate experience

in a very robust

industry such as

telecommunications

and we see in BRM the

architecture that we

need to implement our

new direct to consumer

strategy but also to

expand this business in

the future.”

Renata Pessoa

Director of Corporate Solutions

Grupo Globo

2 Data Sheet / Oracle Communications

Billing and Revenue Management / Version 0.1

Support all stages of the revenue management lifecycle

The key to supporting the flexibility, innovation, agility, and customer-centricity

required for successful service providers is the underlying revenue management

system. Revenue management is the end-to-end process for generating,

capturing, and collecting revenue for each service and customer. Revenue

management includes the ongoing process of analyzing, evaluating, and

optimizing each phase of the lifecycle, providing complete insight and

intelligence into the revenue relationships that customers have with their service

provider and partners. Billing and Revenue Management is the only product-

based revenue management solution that is functionally rich enough to support

the customer-centric, innovative business and revenue growth demands

required by service providers across industries.

Image 2. The revenue management lifecycle supported by BRM functionality

Revenue generation

Revenue generation enables the delivery of services at optimal prices for the user,

service provider, and partner.

Rapid offer, bundle, and tariff design. BRM provides an intuitive web-based

top-down Pricing Design Center (PDC) tool with certified conformance to the TM

Forum SID model. It can be used to configure a full spectrum of service level

product offer, pricing and subscription capabilities with granular rules and to

create unlimited plans, pricing offers, discounts and promotions in minutes,

versus hours or days by leveraging a range of offer building blocks.

Image 3. BRM’s Pricing Design Center allows business users to launch digital offers with design-time flexibility

Key features

 TM Forum certified pricing UI

designed for the business

user

 Ability to rate any metric or

attribute

 Support any payment type or

combination

 Authorize all transactions in

real-time with a superior

experience for digital

services customers

 Monetize any consumer,

enterprise and partner-

enabled revenue stream

while ensuring accurate

accountability at every stage

of the revenue lifecycle.

 Supports partner settlements

for B2B2X and new partner-

led business models.

 Modern architecture with

cloud native foundations

supporting DevOps agility

and efficiency

 64-bit processing

 Extreme scalability and

performance

 Billing and invoicing

 Subscriber lifecycle

management and

subscriptions

 Payment and collections

 Account receivables,

taxation, and general ledger

integration

 Modern, secure web-based

Billing Care and Business

Operations Center

applications

 Productized software that

can be extended by

developers with a fully

documented and supported

SDK

 API framework to integrate

with external applications

 Alignment with TM Forum

Open APIs and ODA

3 Data Sheet / Oracle Communications

Billing and Revenue Management / Version 0.1

PDC’s powerful offer and pricing management capabilities enable service

providers to rapidly respond to market conditions and satisfy sophisticated

customer requirements by offering total pricing flexibility with unparalleled time-

to-market performance. Adaptable to any service provider business model,

BRM enables revenue capture capabilities for any digital service, including cloud,

media, entertainment, and other information services. With real-time access to

customer data, service providers can centrally manage their customers and

partners, and focus on revenue generation by introducing competitive market

leading products and services to the right customers at the right time.

Profitable revenue share and settlements rules for more complex business and

value chains with partners can also be created quickly and securely.

Revenue capture

Revenue capture is the process of rating and charging for the delivery, usage and

consumption of assets and services. Any service metric that can be measured

may be used as part of the pricing model.

Sharing groups. BRM provides sophisticated support for sharing of discounts

and charges across multiple accounts or services. With discount sharing, the

owner’s discount and/or balances are available to members, for example sharing

pooled minutes across corporate account group or sharing a 10% discount

across multiple subscribers in a family or even enabling members to benefit from

volume aggregated at owner level. With charge sharing, the owner pays for a

charge or part of a charge, for example peak minutes or 50% of a monthly fee.

Subscriber lifecycle management and subscriptions. BRM supports end to

end subscriber lifecycle management, from account creation and service

activation, through to management and care. BRM also supports a rich set of

subscription capabilities:

 Cycles of any length: month, day, week, year, or multiples of these

 Service groups for efficient management of multi-service subscriptions

 Backdated and future-dated offer purchase/cancellation

 Proration options for mid-cycle activations/in-activations

 Automated re-rating for backdated actions and rate changes

 Monthly recuring charges (MRC), one-time charges (OTC), and pricing

promotion overrides.

Revenue collection

Revenue collection includes generation of bills and invoices and the accurate

collection of payments.

BRM provides full revenue collection capabilities and provides multi-currency

financial management, accounts receivable, general ledger, taxation, payment

processing and payment terms, collections, and dunning capabilities.

Sophisticated customer and partner relationships. BRM enables service

Related Solutions

BRM is an integrated

component of the following

solutions within the Cloud Scale

Monetization portfolio:

 Cloud Scale Billing. Bill for

anything at any scale with a

cloud native mediation,

billing, and revenue

management system to

invoice payments and

manage subscriptions,

collections, receivables, and

settlements.

 Cloud Scale Charging and

Billing. Monetize anything at

any scale using pre-

integrated charging, offer

design, billing, revenue, and

account management for

accelerated time to cash and

accountability across the

entire revenue lifecycle for

any service and business

model.

“Equifax selected cloud

native deployment of

Oracle Billing and

Revenue Management

to support our critical

transformation

imperatives of adopting

cloud native

architectures that

increase operational

efficiency and

automation by aligning

with DevOps principles.

This positions our

business for greater

agility, speed, and

innovation while

reducing operational

costs.”

Gautam Tulsian

SVP and CIO—Global Finance

Equifax

4 Data Sheet / Oracle Communications

Billing and Revenue Management / Version 0.1

providers to create partner agreements that enable revenues to be shared or

paid and allows royalties to be collected from other third-party service or

network providers and content or media partners. This capability enables partner

settlements to be extended beyond simple sponsorship models to rich multi-

level value chains as common and more prevalent in the wholesale, content and

emerging M2M businesses.

Image 4. BRM supports B2C, B2B and B2B2X subscriber models

Billing and invoicing. BRM is built using patented real-time billing technology

that provides CSPs with unmatched flexibility in supporting diverse billing

requirements such as in-advance, on-demand, suspense management, open

item, and balance forward with fully flexible and variable cycle support.

Payments and collections. BRM supports any payment method whether that be

prepaid or postpaid, cash, credit card, check, vouchers, and coupons with

comprehensive capabilities spanning top-up, grants, gifting, split payments,

loans, deposits, installments, payment incentives, and commissions.

Multiple payment gateways are also pre-integrated such as Chase Paymentech

and Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA). For collections, BRM provides a debt

collections management GUI which enables fully automated collections profiles

and scenarios configuration — including “promise to pay” — and enforcement.

Dunning is provided with automatic notifications.

Account receivables, taxation, and general ledger integration. BRM provides

a rich set of accounts receivable management capabilities including adjustments,

disputes, and settlements along with payments and reversals, write-offs, and

refunds. BRM can provide G/L reporting across any cycle and can be integrated

into third party and Oracle ERP applications. Taxation includes support for real-

time and billing time taxation models, in addition to integration with Vertex.

Revenue analysis

Revenue analysis involves understanding the revenue relationships with

customers and partners which improves the ability to serve their overall needs.

BRM provides revenue analysis across the entire revenue management lifecycle.

It has built-in audit processes to safeguard against revenue leakage and data

consistency and ensures all transactions are conducted with the fullest possible

control, integrity, and completeness.

Oracle Communications

Digital BSS Express

Built on top of BRM, Digital BSS

Express (DBX) is a pre-

integrated and extensible

business support system (BSS)

solution from Oracle

Communications Consulting to

support fixed or mobile

offerings.

 Future-proof. DBX provides

ordering, provisioning,

rating, charging, billing,

customer care, web-based

care, and customer lifecycle

management—all out of the

box—and can be expanded

as needed.

 Agile. Oracle’s BSS solution

supports multiple account

and billing relationships,

wholesale and retail business

models, and distributor

delivery channels. It also

delivers prebuilt, flexible, and

adaptable business

processes based on industry

standards.

 Cost-effective. Providing

modern deployment models

with scalability, performance,

and extensibility at a low

fixed operational cost,

Oracle’s carrier-grade

products can be offered as a

managed service and

deployed on Oracle Cloud

Infrastructure.

Watch a DBX video >>

5 Data Sheet / Oracle Communications

Billing and Revenue Management / Version 0.1

Customer care

Account and billing care client. A UI is provided to easily access subscriber

information and quickly resolve billing inquiries. It is a modern web-based

application to manage billing, payments, and accounts receivable for customer

accounts.

Image 5. BRM provides modern, web-based and user-friendly clients for billing care and business operations

Financial reporting

Billing operation reports and insight. BRM’s Business Operations Center is a

modern, web-based client to enable the creation, scheduling and viewing of

results for operations related to billing, payment collection, invoicing, GL

reporting, product catalog synchronization, and refunds. Using Business

Operations Center, service providers can view key job metrics related to bills

processed, payments collected, invoices and GL reports and create custom jobs.

Business Operations center can also show business trends based on data

generated by the preceding operations for example billed revenue, payments

received, accounts receivable, and the number of active and inactive accounts

that have subscribed to any service. Regular schedules can be set on a

daily/weekly and monthly basis in addition to one-off, immediate or

prescheduled jobs.

Business intelligence and analytics. Revenue analysis reports can be generated

to make informed decisions to optimize service offerings. This helps maximize

revenue and minimize loss associated with fraud, bad debt and revenue drain.

Modular and extensible by design

Oracle uses TM Forum Open APIs and ODA so that its products can

communicate seamlessly and efficiently. BRM is certified against four TM Forum

Open APIs: TMF620 for product catalog management, TMF670 for payment

method management, TMF676 for payment management, and TMF678 for

customer bill management.

Applying an API-first approach using open APIs allows service providers to

support the digital ecosystems of tomorrow, while offsetting any risk of vendor

lock-in.

BRM also has a fully documented rich SDK and API set, exposing over 1,000

revenue management related functions that can be called to create BRM client

Accelerate your digital

business with Oracle

Together with Oracle’s AI-

powered Digital Experience for

Communications (DX4C), BRM

plays a key role in monetizing

differentiated offers as part of a

full concept to cash to care

solution.

 Design, launch and acquire.

Analyze your prospects’

digital identity and signals

and quickly launch offers to

the right customers on the

right channels at the right

moments

 Omnichannel commerce

and care. Enable your

customers to buy services

and resolve questions via

assisted and digital channels,

web and mobile in-app

engagement, billing visibility

and control and proactive

support

 Orchestrate and monetize.

Dynamically orchestrate

orders and monetize any

business model

Learn more about DX4C >>

6 Data Sheet / Oracle Communications

Billing and Revenue Management / Version 0.1

applications and extend the core revenue management functionality. It has an

extensible, objected oriented data model and can interface with external data

sources such as LDAP directories and database queues.

BRM supports inbound request integration with SOAP and the Java Connector

Architecture (JCA) standard and can publish outbound business events using the

Enterprise Application Integration Manager.

Cloud native agility

Service providers and enterprises are increasingly looking to deploy cloud native

architectures to modernize and automate their IT operations. BRM provides a

cloud native deployment option, supporting a Kubernetes-orchestrated

containerized multi-service architecture to facilitate continuous integration /

continuous delivery and DevOps practices. This allows increased agility and

automation, higher availability, and lower operating costs.

Summary

Oracle Communication Billing and Revenue Management is the most widely

deployed system of its kind. It is used globally by hundreds of market leading

telecommunication and digital service providers to cost effectively monetize

their latest innovative and revenue generating services.

Key cloud native features

 Kubernetes-orchestrated

containerized multi-service

architecture

 Choice of Open Container

Initiative based Kubernetes

runtime

 Helm charts simplify

installation of BRM and its

dependencies into a

Kubernetes cluster

 Observability and logging

framework support

 Choice of Oracle database:

physical or containerized

 Utilize any CI/CD pipeline to

support the rapid launch of

differentiating services

 Incorporate BRM

configuration and extension

support

 Deployable on private clouds

behind a firewall or public

cloud infrastructure

 Supports industry standard

cloud native technologies for

volume / cluster networking

and logging and monitoring

 Kubernetes services and

deployments to enable

simpler upgrades and

configuration changes

 Efficient scaling utilizing

Kubernetes inbuilt horizontal

scaling

Connect with us

Call +1.800.ORACLE1 or visit oracle.com. Outside North America, find your local office at: oracle.com/contact.

blogs.oracle.com facebook.com/oracle twitter.com/oracle

provided for information purposes only, and the contents hereof are subject to change

without notice. This document is not warranted to be error-free, nor subject to any other

warranties or conditions, whether expressed orally or implied in law, including implied

warranties and conditions of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. We

specifically disclaim any liability with respect to this document, and no contractual

obligations are formed either directly or indirectly by this document. This document

may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or

mechanical, for any purpose, without our prior written permission.

This device has not been authorized as required by the rules of the Federal

Communications Commission. This device is not, and may not be, offered for sale or

lease, or sold or leased, until authorization is obtained.

Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be

trademarks of their respective owners.

Intel and Intel Xeon are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation. All SPARC

trademarks are used under license and are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC

International, Inc. AMD, Opteron, the AMD logo, and the AMD Opteron logo are trademarks or

registered trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open

Group. 1123