This opinion piece describes Omdia’s Telecom Billing Vendor Survey: Cloud Nativeness, Pre-integrations, and Time to Deploy report for current billing system trends, including considerations when choosing billing systems.
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Summary
In 4Q23, Omdia surveyed 19 telecom billing (revenue management) systems vendors, a market we estimate to be worth around $6.5bn annually.
Our questions covered a variety of topics, including:
- Cloud-nativeness of software
- Frequency of software updates
- Availability of, and demand from customers for, SaaS-based solutions
- Pre-built integrations with other software systems (e.g., charging)
- TM Forum Open API support
- Catalog and low-code configuration
- Use of artificial intelligence (AI) within the billing system
- Support for B2B and B2C in the same billing system
- Support for account hierarchies
- Dunning and collection capabilities
- Bill presentment capabilities
- Implementation timescales
Although the survey results are anonymous, Omdia believes the report will be useful to telecom operators considering buying a new billing system as it highlights areas where solution capabilities diverge and, hence, where their requests for information should focus. We also hope the report is useful for those companies that took part in the survey as they will be able to see how their responses compared with their competitors.
Below, Omdia shares insights gained into one topic—implementation timescales.
Implementation time estimates vary widely between vendors
Implementing a new billing system can be quick and straightforward with SaaS solutions for greenfield operators, taking as little as one month to bring online. However, for expansive brownfield billing transformations, implementation can take as long as a year.
We asked, “What is the average length of implementation time from start to customer acceptance?” As shown in Figure 1, the shortest minimum time cited was one month, and the longest maximum was 12 months. The average of the responses was 4.6 months, and the median response was 2–6 months.
Vendors did not qualify whether their responses referred to greenfield customers or ripping and replacing an existing solution in a brownfield operator. As such, their responses may not be directly comparable. Also, those that indicated a longer time to implement may not have had worse solutions; they might have been more accurate in their estimates.
When evaluating vendors, CSPs should discuss the likely deployment timeline in detail. They should ask what factors will extend the implementation and what can be done to shorten deployments. They should also ask for good and bad examples of customer deployments to understand what to do and avoid. Speaking with those customers to independently verify the good examples is a key part of the due diligence process before engaging a supplier.
Figure 1: Average time to implement a telecom billing solution
Source: Omdia
To see the other results from Omdia’s survey and read our analysis, please refer to the full report cited in the Further reading section.
Appendix
Further reading
Telecom Billing Vendor Survey: Cloud Nativeness, Pre-integrations, and Time to Deploy (January 2024)
Author
Joe Hoffman, Principal Analyst, Service Provider
James Crawshaw, Practice Leader, Service Provider
