Lucent, AMS join forces to provide prepaid solution

In an effort to capture more of the competitive prepaid market, Lucent Technologies Inc. and American Management Systems (AMS; Fairfax, VA) have joined forces to provide an integrated solution that meets a carrier's front-office and back-office needs. This new scalable suite combines Lucent's intelligent network (IN) platform and SurePay prepaid service application with AMS' prepaid customer care and management solution (CCM), INAdvance.

Portugal's Telecel S.A is already using the companies' integrated platforms. INAdvance manages Telecel's prepaid service offerings across Telecel's SIM card-based and Lucent's IN platform-based technologies by delivering one unified customer care and management solution.

"Adding a dedicated Prepaid back-office solution, INAdvance, we were able to further enrich our IN Prepaid platform," said Christian Van Ghelder, vice president of Lucent's Intelligent Networking and Messaging Systems division for Europe, Middle East, and Africa. "Our alliance with AMS significantly strengthens our position in the prepaid arena, supporting our efforts to deliver exceptional levels of customer care in this rapidly growing market."

Lucent delivers a comprehensive portfolio of enhanced services and open IN platforms that operate in multi-vendor network environments. SurePay is built on Lucent's open IN platform, supporting lifecycle management, service classes to address different market segments, tariffing, and roaming. The SurePay suite supports multiple technologies and protocols, including GSM wireless, and ANSI-41 wireline standards and is designed to evolve to support General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) as well as Lucent's PacketIN services for next-generation IP networks.

AMS's INAdvance covers the entire customer value chain including account creation, product and tariff creation, real-time rating, service provisioning, as well as other back-office functions.

The customer care and self-care interfaces are available on a Web and WAP platform. The solution allows operators to implement more customer-focused pricing structures based on a variety of different market segments, together with advanced prepaid bonuses, discounts, and customer loyalty programs. Also, it has the capability to process and rate prepaid GPRS and SMS events through its real-time rating engine, which is complementary to Lucent's IN prepaid solution.

Edited by Ellen Jensen
Managing Editor, Wireless Networks Online