Backend challenge
To be able to withstand the growing mobile data traffic, Safaricom signed a three-year agreement late last year with Huawei Technologies to upgrade its wireless infrastructure, and conducted technical trials on LTE.
At the same time, Saraficom contracted Huawei to replace its legacy IN system with a convergent billing system (CBS) so the operator can quickly rollout new services and respond to customer needs.
The CBS consolidates and centralizes all of the operator's billing functions across multiple divisions and services as well as customer relationship management.
"It [convergent billing system] is almost like the holy grail of billing for us, and we're the first operator that has deployed the CBS in Kenya and East Africa," said Michael Joseph, the recently retired CEO of Safaricom. Joseph, who has ran Safaricom since the company was founded in 2000, stepped down from his position as CEO late last year. He now is a director.
The key benefit of the new platform, said Joseph, is faster turnaround for new products, services and promotions.
"With the previous IN platform, if we wanted to launch a service, we had to ask the vendor to design the service, because of the complexity of the platform," he explained. "But now we don't have to go back to the vendor, we can design and launch most of the new services in house."
Derry Li, VP of Huawei's next-generation business support solution division, said the CBS enables Safaricom to reduce time to market for new services from months to days and cut opex and capex by an estimated 30%.
The CBS system, Li said, supports various infrastructure networks and services and provides online rating, real-time control and express billing, thus greatly shortening time to market.