LHS, a leading provider of telecom billing and customer care systems across the wireless, wireline, and IP telecom markets worldwide was awarded today the “2007 Stratecast Global Investment of R&D Resources to Address Core Billing Needs Award” by the Stratecast Research Group of Frost & Sullivan.

“The Award is bestowed upon the company that has carried out extensive research and has a strong commitment to research and development as demonstrated by the relative level of R&D expenditures to the company’s size. It also recognizes a company’s research and development program that has or is expected to bring significant contributions to the billing sector in terms of adoption, change, and competitive posture,” said Karl Whitelock, Senior Consulting Analyst at Stratecast. LHS won the award because of its significant and sustained emphasis on research and development.

LHS has since the year 2001 significantly invested into R&D and has successfully applied this investment to its business and product offerings. The investment has been mainly used for rearchitecting its BSCS business support system, resulting in BSCS iX, a fully convergent end-to-end componentized realtime billing system providing web-based applications for customer care and self-care.

“LHS was the obvious choice for our award. The company is a global industry leader regarding billing sector R&D. It has invested considerable resources in R&D and has successfully converted the results of the research into innovative and sustainable business solutions,” Whitelock added.

In the billing sector, outstanding performance in a real-time system means low latency, but high throughput is also essential in both batch and real-time modes. LHS’ BSCS iX has a latency of sub-20ms for rating and has one of the best-performing rating and billing engines on the market. The system supports full convergence across all markets, services and payments – wireline and wireless, voice, data, content and IPTV, prepaid and postpaid.

In addition, BSCS iX can be scaled to match the customer’s needs from entry level to serving to large Tier 1 subscribers. “Its forward-looking R&D investments excellently position LHS in the billing and related areas in the future when convergence of networks and technologies, and the resulting exponential explosion of service offerings are expected to take center stage,” said Karl Whitelock.

Another criterion for receiving the award is LHS’ use of technology to promote integration, interoperability, and userfriendliness. Within BSCS iX, business documents are all created in the XML format, allowing for paper or electronic bills to be defined in the layout needed by the carrier. Further flexible XML output formats enable bill generation as required as well as electronic billing e.g. for web-based customer self-care. In addition, open and standard-based APIs enable stepwise migrations, easier integration with other systems, and preintegration with major financial systems.

“Our recently announced benchmark results of BSCS iX rating more than 320 million usage data records per hour, as well as the generation of 1.69 million invoices per hour in the offline mode and 550,000 invoices per hour in the real-time mode are indicative of LHS’s ability to convert R&D efforts into business results,” said Dr. Jens Troetscher, Chief Technology Officer of LHS.

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About LHS
LHS is a leading provider of telecom billing and customer care systems across the wireless, wireline, and IP telecom markets worldwide. LHS Business Support Systems offer full convergence on various levels, supporting the complete range of business models both across the mix of fixed and mobile services, as well as prepaid and postpaid services. LHS builds innovative systems that enable our customers to introduce new services fast, helping drive revenues up, while keeping operational costs to a minimum. LHS was awarded “Best Billing or Customer Care Solution” by the GSM Association in Cannes in 2005, and won the IIR World Billing Awards for its “Overall Best Contribution to Billing” in London in 2005 and 2006. LHS is an independent software vendor (ISV) with headquarters in Germany, and offices in Brazil, Czech Republic, France, Malaysia, Turkey, and United Arab Emirates.

For more information, please visit www.lhsgroup.com

About Stratecast
Stratecast is the Research Group division of Frost & Sullivan. Stratecast’s industry analysts and market experts provide the telecommunications industry with market consulting and tactical strategic forecasting. This market information and industry research helps senior executives make critical business, technology, product, partnership, and tactical strategy decisions. Stratecast’s custom consulting, analyst availability and market subscriptions provide the firm with winning business growth strategies.

For more information, please visit http://www.frost.com/prod/servlet/sphome.