Metapath Software Corp. today introduced its Cerve Provisioning Manager 2.0, which will be commercially available during the fourth quarter.
The Cerve product is a real-time provisioning platform designed to decrease carriers’ time-to-market for new products and services and reduce operating costs. The product acts as a hub for activation order, user interaction, network element and billing applications by managing interactions between the separate systems. The platform’s object-oriented architecture can cut time-to-market in half compared with legacy systems, estimated Metapath.
Cerve also allows carriers to offer new activation possibilities, including Internet-based activation for select customers and self selection of price plans, said the company. The product also would allow a carrier to provide a block of numbers to a large corporate customer, which then could manage its own activations.
“It allows carriers to offer choices to their customers, and that improves loyalty and satisfaction,” said Andy Levy, Metapath’s director of product marketing for the Cerve product.
Several factors are driving change in the provisioning system environment, said Levy. Notably, mergers and acquisitions are creating situations where carriers must integrate two different billing systems. Carriers also are using different billing systems for different services, such as traditional and prepaid service, he said.
A product like Cerve, he said, allows carriers to adapt to those situations.
Cerve can work independently or together with Metapath’s other two products-the Ceos Mediation Manager and the Ceer Customer Manager. Ceos collects and distributes network usage data, and Ceer is a marketing tool that analyzes that data together with demographic and lifestyle information. Together, the products form a cycle that turns usage data into knowledge and allows carriers to improve their networks and introduce new products based on that information, said the company.
For example, integrating Ceer with Cerve allows carriers to target specific customers for promotions. If a carrier wanted to run a short message service promotion for a specific segment of customers, the Ceer software would determine which customers to target based on behavior patterns such as where, when and how long customers are using their wireless phones. The Cerve software then automatically could notify customers of the promotion and activate those customers to the service and deactivate them when the promotion is over.
Cerve is Year-2000 compliant.
