Billing services provider Comverse announced the availability of the Comverse ONE Billing and Active Customer Management solution, built around a single data model and single product catalog.

The solution is basically designed to help operators find and quickly promote new offers and promotions to the market, as well as give them the ability to use one system to manage all subscribers consistently, regardless of payment or service type. 

With the solution, Comverse is removing a lot of the integration points that operators have with existing systems while retaining real-time marketing capabilities, according to Alice Bartram, assistant vice president of marketing at Comverse’s Converged Billing Solutions Group. “We feel that our architectural approach is quite unique in the market,” she said.

Operators that offer mostly postpaid services might be interested in offering real-time usage monitoring to customers, especially in the area of content. For example, parents could set a limit on the number of SMS messages their kid sends and get an alert so the teen or pre-teen can still use the phone for emergencies but not go over the SMS limit for that month.

Operators don’t need to do one big billing upgrade – they can upgrade over time; the solution also serves as an upgrade patch for existing Comverse customers.

While big U.S. operators have been whittling down the number of billing systems they acquired through consolidation, a lot of operators globally are still working with multiple billing systems from multiple vendors, she said. One quad-play customer in the Caribbean has about nine systems today and will be replacing those with a single Comverse solution.