T-mobile, famous for its concise magenta-coloured logo, has searched for a central and flexible billing mediation platform for five countries in order to improve its competitive position on the mobile operations market. NEWCON Ltd. has scoured with the Next Generation Mediation Technology from Digital Route: software-license and implementation of Mediation Zone 5. The Next Generation International Billing Mediation Device (ngiBMD) has been implemented with a target to reduce the total cost of ownership for billing mediation service by 20% for the 5 countries together. Thanks to NEWCON´s long-time experience as service integrator, the major lines of business including GSM, SMS and GPRS were launched in production within 6 months since project start.

T-mobile is the brand for the mobile phone sector of Deutsche Telekom AG. 150 million customers are phoning in Germany, the foreign European countries and the USA currently. The mobile phone market is one of the most dynamic sectors in many countries. T-Mobile has contributed to this development with innovative ideas and is considered worldwide as one of the pacesetters of future-oriented technologies as GPRS, UMTS (3G) or wireless internet access via W-LAN. T-Mobile was the first supplier in Europe who provided open access to the internet for its customers so that they can make use of increasing variety of offers of news, films, music and infotainment.

T-Mobile Austria is a fully-owned subsidiary and generated a turnover of 1.08 billion euros with only about 1500 employees. The tariffs were constantly developed in the strongly competitive Austrian environment and individually adapted to the consumer behaviour. Germany, Great Britain, the Czech Republic and Netherlands are fully-owned subsidiaries beside Austria and they care together for aprox. 70 million mobile phone customers.

Project target: next generation billing mediation system to improve the competitive position

–Out of date technologies influenced the performance of the systems as well as the time to market (time needed to realise new demands). New services and products were difficult to implement and expensive hardware was needed to mitigate increasing traffic data volumes. The outcome of this were the following requirements for a project:

–Improvement of time to market: fast reactions to changed functionalities of network elements should be possible. New services and products should permanently and easily be offered alike.

–Next generation international Billing Mediation Device (ngiBMD): the total traffic data for Voice, SMS and Data generated by the network should be processed by a single system.

–The mediation (transmission of data) between the network and the processing unit should be provided centrally as a service for all 5 countries (the fully-owned subsidiaries).

–Development and Maintenance should be provided by internal common unit “Competence Center Mediation” (CCM) of T-Mobile International.

–The system should be deployed in a Group common Datacenter and operated by T-Systems Enterprise Services.

Why NEWCON & Digital Route: future-oriented technology and experience for the implementation

After a one-year intensive vendor selection process NEWCON was invited for the project in April 2009. The offer was submitted by a syndicate:

–Digital Route for MediationZone™ core technology

–NEWCON for system integration

Digital Route, a Swedish software company and leading provider of mediation- and data integration software, has been with its product MediationZone™ a worldwide technology-leader within its sector for years.

Main drivers for the decision to involve NEWCON in this project:

–long-time experience which T-Mobile Austria could gain with NEWCON as service integrator

–the future-oriented choice of Next Generation Mediation Technology. As T-Mobile was used to managing different suppliers, systems and responsibilities the first move was made to operate everything from one source: there should only be 1 software, 1 hardware-environment, 1 service partner and 1 license for the implementation of the discussed data preparation regarding the three areas IT, Network and Finance/Controlling.

Joachim Heybrock, VP Shared IT Enablers, confirms: „Due to the fact that we can hardly influence the revenue side we must increasingly see to the expenditures. NEWCON is an innovative and efficient partner who looks ahead, together with technology expert knowledge and implementation competence. Because of the proven know-how which extends over several years as well as the convincing savings potential of the Next Generation Mediation Technology we decided to assign the syndicate of the two technology partners Digital Route and NEWCON.”

Used technologies

The core technology is Digital Routes MediationZone™ to retrieve mass data in telecommunication business, to convert and process it. Every phone call, SMS or internet access of every customer on the domestic market or abroad is registered and evaluated. MediationZone™ and the relevant modules developed by NEWCON enable T-Mobile to manage the commercial and technical sector with one system. As MediationZone™ is a completely Java-based solution it is hardware independent. At T-Mobile two Intel-based servers configured in stretched cluster are used to guarantee system stability. As all turnover- and revenue relevant transactions are processed by these servers, MediationZone™ has the highest standard of security, system stability and SOX compliance as far as the solution design is concerned.

MediationZone™ is compatible with all current data bases (Oracle or Open source) and operating systems; hence it does not require any third party software. Christoph Mazakarini, CTO NEWCON and project leader for T-Mobile accounts for the advantages: “The two servers which we need for complete operation cost 25,000 US-dollars per item. This leads to reduction of CPU cost by 50% with remarkably better performance at the same time.”

Course of the project: short lead time, support on-site

The project start was in Austria in May 2009, the project steps were geared to the “line of business”. First of all the migration of SMS-services was effected followed by data services. About 2/3 of the functionalities are productive at present, all lines should be productive by the end of January 2010. The roll-out for the next four countries will partly be conducted at the same time. Parallel to this the platform for the operation of the data processing centre was installed in common Datacenter as well as the Software MediationZone™ at Competence Center Mediation in Prague. Up to 12 experts from NEWCON are working on the implementation, partly on site at the customer’s premises. The location of Vienna offers advantage of proximity to T-Mobile Austria and CCM in Prague too.

Milos Cimoradsky, Senior Head of Competence Center Mediation in T-Mobile International confirms: “The personal contact is crucial for the co-operation; it helps the experts from T-Mobile and NEWCON to solve issues more efficiently than per e-mails and allows for faster implementation. NEWCON experts proved to be highly flexible and technically skilled.” Change Requests are often implemented within 2-3 days. The know-how is transferred from NEWCON to T-Mobile by a three-stage training: training for the correct operation of the data processing centre, developer training at Competence Center and hands-on training by co-operating on site.

Benefit

The project is still in the implementation phase, however it is absolutely clear for T-Mobile to see that the demands are met and thus the desired benefit can be achieved:

–Modifications concerning the active business as new tariffs can be implemented within few man-days. This improves competitive position of T-Mobile noticeably as more flexible models can be offered to the end-consumer.

–The new platform brings remarkable increase in performance of transmission time. Tests have shown an improvement of factor 3.5, as well as a remarkable decrease in CPU cost.

–The solution from one partner allows sustainable cost reduction. T-Mobile is able to save costs to compensate for the decreasing revenue relevant ARPU (average revenue per user).

Jan Karlsson, CEO Digital Route, is very proud of his new customer: “The conclusion of the contract with T-Mobile International is a milestone on our way to market leadership on the mediation market. We are proud that the close partnership with NEWCON has developed successfully and are perfectly convinced that we will celebrate further mutual success in future.”

Gerald Haidl, CEO NEWCON, sums up: “We are a partner for T-Mobile who proves competence on two levels: strategy and implementation – that means we support our customers from management consulting to service integration. We are aware of the needs of IT, Technology, Sales and Finance. Only with this overall view we are able to meet the objectives of an international major customer as DTAG/T-Mobile.