INTEGRATIONS - they're not all the same.
We're often asked can you integrate with this or that? It should be easy, probably 1 or two days (right!?) ... that statement and reality are often times very far apart from one another and for various reasons.
1) INTEGRATION SCOPE - The goal of any integration is to seamlessly bridge two systems in such a manner the two functionally become one indivisible cog in the back office of a business. The manner in which these systems communicate is enabled through the use of API's ... the purpose of these API's are to facilitate the exchange of business information generated by the operation of the business. The first and most common challenge we experience regarding integrations is incomplete API coverage. Meaning, not all functional operations of a given platform are accessible via API. API’s are often an add-on technology which is bolted onto an existing platform to expose “some” of it’s functions via an integrated experience. Because of this dilemma, we (RevX) stick with a strict policy of 100% functional coverage with our API. As a result, it can be challenging to fill in the missing gaps when the API doesn't go far enough ... this translates to time and more source code to implement the missing functionality. Examples of this in the MVNO world are things like mid-cycle rate plan changes, device IMEI swaps on active SIMs, and SMS messaging to the edge device.
2) ERROR HANDLING - Error Handling and workflow awareness - this is a critical one. API's we often see utilize a fire-n-forget pattern that I liken to those old-fashioned vacuum tubes used at banks we all experienced in the 70's and 80's where a customer stuffs a business request into a tube and closes the door and a human receives it and fulfills the request. Since the point of integration is to automate (eliminate human intervention), we can't rely on humans to interpret exceptions to the communication flow. Suppose an empty or incomplete request is sent through the tube, when the human on the other end receives it, they engage the speaker and ask the customer what they need because the request was either ambiguous or otherwise incomplete. This condition is pervasive in the integration space. Meaning, the integrating party is left to implement their own functional experience around how and what to do when calls with the API are incomplete and/or don't result in the expected outcome. This is an expensive and time-consuming process and varies dramatically based on the maturity level of the system being integrated with. Really good examples of this in the MVNO landscape are platforms which don’t utilize proper error handling. Meaning, the integrating party is forced into a pattern of development that requires polling and asking the hosting system … are you done yet … are you done yet … are you done yet? This pattern has never been a good choice for robust or even reliable systems development. Yet, we often see this in the telecommunications landscape, and we build a facade around it to emulate good error handling practices. As a result of this pattern, it casts some doubt on the reliability of the final outcome of a given API request. For instance, suppose a hosting platform requires polling to ascertain if an attempt to activate actually successfully finished. Suppose the integrating platform had been polling for 20 hours and finally gave up (timed out), yet the hosting platform actually finishes the work in 22 hours … the integrating system is burdened with that workflow all because of how the exposed API’s don’t provide a quality, reliable, and synchronous (sequential) response to the API call. All of these holes have to be filled in and coded.
3) SUPPORT and DOCUMENTATION - This one is particularly challenging because of the technology landscape. There are popular methods for generating self-documenting API's with products like swagger, but sadly these simply fall short because they focus on documenting the details of data types and data structures instead of functional narrative and context. This isn't to say you can't do that with these products, it's just that it's often overlooked because from the outset, it is presumed from the beginning of developing an API layer to an existing system that the tool will generate your documentation so not much effort (if any at all) is afforded for technical writing when it absolutely should be! As a result, integrating parties are left to fend for themselves to define boundaries around the business information and its relevance to an integration. These are often times guesses which lead to failed integrations because part of the functional context is discovered during the test or operational phase of the integration ... this is the most expensive mistake that can be made.
Have more questions? -
(949) 200-7589
Charging & Billing
Flexibility to capitalize on new opportunities, react to competitive developments, and address new pricing or billing requirements. RevX provides:
Monetize any M2M or Internet of Things offering
Simple-to-use and fully automated
Ensure accurate and timely billing
Charging (also known as Rating)
The RevX Rating engine provides comprehensive business rules authoring and runtime environment to prepare pricing rules based on "any" unit of measure (carrier data plans, number of turns of a machine, data stored, etc.). The Platform can process network and usage from any client application in real time to calculate billing, monitor policy, or for reporting purposes.
The RevX Rating engine delivers the highest levels of performance and protection against system failure or revenue leakage ensuring accurate up-to-the-minute account information and financial data. Real-time credit limit monitoring also significantly reduces financial risks.
Feature Spotlight
Unit of Measure - define any unit of measure without the need to involve programming or even technical resources. Upon creation, new Units of Measure can be immediately used within the composition of any business rule.
Volumetric Rules - define business rules which address pricing structures that require a graduated pricing scheme, whereas a subscriber may be charged more or less as the volume of usage activity increases. For example: Charge $1.00 for the first 25 megabytes, $0.75 for the second 25 megabytes, and $.50 for every 1 megabyte thereafter.
Tiered Rules - Tiered pricing rules are especially useful when trying to model package pricing which is based on a fixed price table. For example: Charge $5.00 per megabyte when megabytes used is between 1 and 25, and Charge $7.50 per megabyte when megabytes used is between 26 and 75, and charge $10.00 per megabyte when megabytes used is greater than 75.
Percentage Rules - In the case where subscriber events (usage data) represent point-of-sale transactions, it is useful to calculate fees based on a percentage of the transaction (revenue share) for the business activity. For example: Charge 7% for every dollar between $1.00 and $25.00, and 4% for every dollar greater than $25.00.
Custom Rules - as part of the document delivered with the system, new billing rule types can be easily added to the system to extend its capabilities.
Expiration Dates - Rules can be authored and staged for activation on a specific date and expired after a certain period of time to offer promotional pricing structures based on metered subscriber events.
Rounding - you control how the rating engine will group and/or round chunks of usage. This is especially important in the telco markets where calls are monitored by the minute but billed in 6 second increments.
Grouping - for some billing rules, it may be necessary to snapshot usage information and calculate based on maximum or minimum values within a billing cycle. In the case of bandwidth monitoring an average of bandwidth used for the period may be preferred while in some cases maybe the peak bandwidth is desirable.
Billing
Manages complex business partnerships, multiple business units, and bill processing functions of your back office.
The RevX Billing system provides all of the features of a carrier grade billing solution and more. Unlike other billing solutions which evolved from the Telco space, the RevX Billing product was designed from the beginning to address the complex needs of billing for any type of e-service for almost any industry.
Feature Spotlight
Bundled Services - Arrange top selling Services into Packages to offer promotional pricing, free trial periods, and special discounts and premiums.
Invoice Generation - Beginning with the design of the invoice and customized marketing messages, the RevX Billing product will provide all of the necessary functions to aggregate transactional detail, collate into a single invoice and present it for payment by way of;
Sales Commission Tracking - Track commissions due to sales reps on subscriber purchases. Deferred compensation, Percentage based bounties, and flat rate fees are all supported.
Master Bill-to Accounts (N-Tier) - Develop a billing model which allows for a parent/child relationship to exist between subscribers without any hierarchal limitations.
Syndication - The RevX Billing Product provides a powerful syndication model which allows for many (unlimited) distinct business lines to be managed by a single installation of the application. All data relevant to a business line is logically separated in the database through the Security Manager features of the RevX Service Delivery Platform (SDP). Adding or removing the view of a business unit to a group or individual is very easy, thus allowing for a singular or composite view of many business units within a single report.
General Ledger Integration - Track revenue by GL accounts making the integration into a General Ledger system even more seamless. Summary or detailed level information can be shared with downstream systems.
Payment Processing
Process a variety of payment methods from subscribers including credit cards, checks, bank drafts, and batch transfers.
The RevX Payment Processing product provides full support for credit card authorization, processing and collection. Tracks terms, provides dunning as well as reversals and write offs. Real-time third party payment processing integration is supported with Authorize.net and many others.
Feature Spotlight
Credit Card Processing - automate the encumbrance of funds using a merchant account and payment gateway to accept payments on any major credit card.
Bank Drafts - for subscribers who choose to pay by direct debit, setup your merchant account and payment gateway to accept EFT's and RevX will automatically process these EFT's.
Refunds - issue credit card refunds based on operational needs.
Cash/Check Processing - post payments directly into subscriber accounts for cash and/or check payments.
Returned Items - in the event a subscriber's check is returned to your bank, the payments can be reversed from their cash balance.
Cash Reconciliation - balance cash between your subscribers and merchant account prior to balancing bank cash to ensure all transactions have been swept into the account and that no obvious fraud has taken place.
Fraud Prevention - collect cardholder address data and security codes to strengthen the fraud prevention measures provided by most payment gateways.
Customer Management
Manage and control subscriber and reseller relationships along with their pricing catalog, profiles, preferences and network devices
Customer Management
Manage subscription and partner relationships with an integrated CRM solution designed to address customer billing inquiries, service issues, or refunds while empowering the call center representative to cross-sell additional services or offer other upgrades.
The RevX CRM module assists call center staff in resolving customer billing or service acquisition questions immediately over the phone. The RevX CRM application does not overlap or replace your organization’s existing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System. Rather, the RevX CRM product specifically addresses service and billing related matters with your subscribers.
Key Benefits:
Correspondence Logging - note important conversations or events on subscriber accounts to document subscriber contact.
Subscriber Maintenance - perform a variety of maintenance functions on behalf of a subscriber when they elect to call versus self-manage their account over the web.
Billing Information - subscribers may need to update billing information. Should they choose to call the service center as opposed to self-manage the CSR can perform these updates on their behalf.
User Maintenance - a subscriber can create one or more users within their account. The most common example of this is a household or SMB.
Password Reset - subscribers may need to request a password reset in the event they don't know their secret answer response.
Suspension/Re-activation - in the event of non-payment or failed credit card processing, a subscriber account can be automatically or manually suspended. If the RevX Provisioning engine is resident then all services will also be disabled to ensure the subscriber can no longer utilize their services.
Search Technology - the RevX CRM application contains an advanced search technology which provides full-text index searching.
Device Management
Manage profile, current carrier status, rate plan, and threshold alerts for individual devices within a customer or account relationship.
Customer Acquisition and Self Care Portal
Empower subscribers to self-manage their account and eliminate manual data entry. RevX Self Care allows end-users to gain access to their accounts 24/7.
Reduce call center volume, online self-care can handle routine inquiries on many topics including data usage and billing information.
Connector
Provides a seamless integration with carriers, cloud, and mobile applications enabling on-demand provisioning, policy management, usage monitoring, and workflow orchestration.
RevX Integration Platform satisfies a broad range of enterprise requirements for federating and integrating systems. This messaging-based gateway addresses service usage monitoring, data security, message validation & transformation, business process orchestration and rules management.
Key Benefits:
Process Event Records from any Source - RevX interfaces with carrier networks, applications, operating systems, and devices to gather usage information relative to subscriber activities. Unlike other billing solutions, RevX provides an automated tool to collect event records to provide full traceability and audit capabilities. RevX can handle virtually any event record in near real time to provide visibility, rules-based processing or provide the ability to charge and bill.
Revenue Assurance - RevX acts as a data repository, a key advantage for businesses and service providers looking to reuse this valuable data for other purposes. RevX provides the ability to reconcile subscriber events to wholesale charges, providing a device level profitability analysis - a key value added capability that other billing platforms cannot provide.
Bi-directional Messaging - Multi-protocol message bus interoperates with JMS, MQ Series, Tibco or RevX messaging technologies and provides optimized in-memory routing and reliable delivery.
Greater scalability - Carrier grade performance, scalability and manageability with unique RevX Grid technology.
Business Process Orchestration - provides for activity monitoring, message validation and access to RevX Library of plug-ins.
RevX has standardized and simplified the integration of carrier and client third party systems to provide a richer business process with features typically found in much more expensive solutions such as a robust partner manager, service orchestration, event interpretation, correlation, pattern matching and monitoring.
Reporting
Prepare, deliver and create reports that’ll help you and your customers make better, more informed business decisions.
Designed to provide out of the box reports with report authoring and delivery capability.
Feature Spotlight
Report Generation - Reports can be generated for various types of display devices such as cell phones, email clients, mobile devices and graphical display devices. This feature allows the report author to optimize the arrangement of information for a given target device.
Report Authoring - The reporting system uses XML as it's definition language and provides an open solution upon which any style of reports can be added to the environment without programming resources.
Data Security - a strict data access layer ensures user level access is restricted to authorized fields in the database.
Data Exports - Reports can be written which permit the extraction of any data from the RevX database resulting in the ability to mine data from the system using tools like Microsoft Excel.
Scheduled Reports - Reports can be scheduled to run at regular intervals.
Branding - The standard reports provided with the system are easy to brand with any look-and-feel - including artwork and/or logo's.
Syndication - Reports will automatically inherit views of business units based on the RevX SDP configuration. Each business unit within the system can have it's own set of branded reports thus allowing each business to have completely customized reports.
