COMMUNICATIONS NEWS

Vodafone Bills with ILOG Rules
New Billit covers mobile IP and content commerce

Vodafone TeleCommerce GmbH. ensures the flexibility of Vodafone Billit, a new billing solution for mobile-communications providers, by using ILOG Rules, the business rule component setting new standards for the communications industry.

Vodafone TeleCommerce is owned by Vodafone Group Plc., the world's fourth most valuable company in terms of market capitalization ($350 billion) and the biggest mobile phone business group in the world, with approximately 78.7 million customers in 25 countries on five continents as of December 2000.

Vodafone TeleCommerce provides mobile phone solutions, services and products, and contributes to the development of IT in telecommunications. The company concentrates on three business areas: billing and IT solutions, mobile commerce products and solutions, and internal services for the Vodafone Group.

"We were extremely impressed by the flexibility offered by ILOG Rules for managing the billing logic in our product," said Dr. Jürgen Lemke, Billit project manager at Vodafone. "We could tell ILOG Rules was written specifically for this sort of deployment because its highly intuitive development environment let us quickly do exactly what we wanted to do in. Moreover, its openness will enable our customers to easily adapt the product to their needs for many years to come."

Formerly known as Mannesmann TeleCommerce, Vodafone TeleCommerce developed Billit in just eight months, and plans to replace existing billing systems with the new solution.

Billit provides real-time billing for mobile Internet Protocol (IP) and content commerce. Users inside and outside the Vodaphone group are expected to benefit from Billit.

Strong Need for Flexibility
Billing applications for mobile IP and content commerce require tremendous flexibility in order to adapt quickly to changes in customer demand, industry regulation and competition. ILOG Rules is ideal for creating complex billing systems like Billit, which can simultaneously be used by several companies and cover a vast variety of services.

ILOG Rules has an integrated development environment for creating and debugging applications, and a customizable and extensible language that places rule definition in the hands of business users such as marketing and customer service personnel. A highly versatile business-rule engine, ILOG Rules is also very lightweight, making it not only easy to embed, but high in performance.

Also available in Java, as ILOG JRules, ILOG Rules is becoming widely used throughout telecom for alarm filtering and correlation, customer billing and billing mediation, and customer relationship management.