Solace Systems

Billing Infrastructure

“Bills travel through the mail at twice the speed of checks.”

- Steven Wright

Many communications services and utility computing providers generate millions or even billions of daily events such as call detail records (CDRs), billing charges, tariff rules and carrier interconnect records each of which may be making or costing them money. Decisions regarding pre-paid balances, best resource call routing, or how data delivery can be more efficiently fanned out across a network can help service providers reduce costs, provide superior service and improve service performance guarantees. These events arrive in such sheer volume, however, that they need to be aggregated before processing, or processed after the fact.

Any provider that can’t analyze and make decisions based on these events, as they are occurring, is at a competitive disadvantage. Each CDR often must be routed to different billing systems based on call details. Catching system abuses and revenue leakage may mean the difference between a marginally profitable network and a very profitable one. Today, traffic volumes have to be heavily segmented and parallelized to be processed anywhere near real time, resulting in highly fragmented views of service activity that is very difficult to manage.

Solution Summary

Solace provides a hardware-based event processing platform that can evaluate high-volume traffic like CDRs and traffic load statistics in real time. Solace helps manage call or data flow to best match operational policies. Solace implements high-speed and persistent messaging coupled with the ability to inspect, route and transform content in real time. Solace moves this traditional software functionality into dedicated hardware increasing performance by 10 to 100 times with ultra-low consistent latency.

This allows wireless and wireline carriers to make real-time decisions relating to billing, fraud detection and the other essential factors that can make the difference between profits and losses in retail, business and wholesale networks. Solace provides capacity for millions of rules to be dynamically set and changed as network and business conditions change so each call or data service request can be handled as efficiently as possible. Unlike software solutions, Solace embeds intelligence about these events directly within the network, eliminating the need for racks of servers and allowing real-time processing of what is mostly done after the fact in data warehouses today. Knowing in real time where inefficiencies lie and where fraudulent activity is occurring is key to limiting losses and optimizing profit margins.

Value to Customers

Solace content networking solutions drives many benefits to event monitoring systems:

  • Simplified event monitoring operations — Solace’s content networking layer removes the need for large numbers of application servers in favor of content routers that operate very similarly to IP routers, but at the content level. A Solace infrastructure can be 10 to 50 times fewer nodes than a software solution reducing hardware, software, power and cooling costs. Even greater is the savings in simplified operations, manual configuration and change management.
  • Increased operational agility — Solace’s event management solution allows easy programmatic control of content inspection and routing rules allowing a highly fluid environment that can adjust as new business relationships are formed, network loads change or fraudulent activity is identified.
  • More profitable business operations — Real-time monitoring of billions of events per day provides visibility and control not possible today through after-the-fact data warehouse reporting. Individual treatment of events like CDRs and fraudulent use of resources minimizes costs and improves profitability of voice and data operations.
  • Improved SLA management — Solace content networking solutions provide tighter controls and earlier warnings when SLA terms are at risk of violation allowing faster response and reduced penalties. This is another source of positive contribution to improved customer satisfaction and the service provider’s bottom line.