How slow a burn will depend on many factors. For one, how far can CSPs really stretch the capabilities of existing billing and management systems.
Most agree, however, that manual assets currently used for enterprise billing and black-boxed billing assets for voice services will not be feasible if cloud computing is to be a viable line of business for CSPs.
"For one, the ad hoc processes in these systems will not work, and the fact many CSPs have unified their billing on residential platforms means they won't accommodate wholesale/retail environments or the characteristics of settlement and dispute processes, which are very different in business lines than in residential voice, where standardized invoice adjustments or negotiated contracts can be manually managed," notes Zone. He contends more open billing platforms are going to be a necessity.
For "dynamic" or "service-based" concepts to come to fruition in billing, the systems and approaches popular in the 1990s and early 2000s - those made up of embedded business logic or hard coding - will ultimately have to give way to open, dynamic billing.
Either CSPs will bite the bullet and make the changes to their systems, or they may end up looking to cloud providers that can bill on their behalf. For example, salesforce.com wrote its own billing software and markets its ability to do billing for cloud services for gaming companies and other content players. It's also possible the existing generation of billing vendors will do billing on behalf of the CSPs in a hosted manner.
Another model would be one where CSPs adopt open, dynamic billing that they can then offer on a hosted basis to cloud providers. While most cloud providers understand they have to work with network operators to successfully syndicate services, it will be interesting to see how network operators embrace retailing bandwidth to cloud providers.
"If cloud becomes a valuable product line, service providers will need open billing systems that accommodate different units of measure, such as CPU, storage capacity and QoS, as well as different product catalogs and policy management, as well as partner settlement," notes Guy Hilton, product marketing manager for Amdoc's revenue management division.
To get to more open, dynamic billing, a change of mindset is necessary, says Elisabeth Rainge, IDC's director of NGN operations and telecom software. "Billing has to move away from the IT mentality that the cost of fiber, servers, storage and software will be recouped by charges levied against a user; it's now about the experience as we move from a product-driven philosophy to a service-driven philosophy."