Kabira Technologies has announced the release of Kabira Charging 2.0, its convergent charging, mediation and policy management platform software. By integrating fine-grained control and charging for services onto a unified, extreme transaction platform, Kabira Charging 2.0 is claimed to enable service providers to achieve substantial business efficiencies while supporting the rapid creation of new product offerings and creative charging models – including multi-play bundles.
Kabira Charging 2.0 is optimized to work with the Cisco Content Services Gateway 2 server (CSG2), a high-speed processing module that provides a host of service control and billing functions. Kabira Charging 2.0 offers advanced capabilities for on/off-line, batch, event and session-based charging, as well as fine-grain policy management for both prepaid/post-paid IP service subscribers.
"With the combination of Kabira Charging and the Cisco CSG2, service providers are able to enhance their competitiveness and business agility in the telecom marketplace," said Chris Clabaugh, vice president of business development at Kabira. "Kabira Charging leverages several similarly deployed solutions based on our Kabira Transaction Platform's software-based high-availability clustering technology. This is in combination with our in-memory, object-oriented, event-driven architecture." Clabaugh added, "Operators now have the benefit of an advanced and proven solution, which delivers powerful network and service control, an enhanced end-user experience, and provides the ability to offer a variety of service plans beyond the typical 'time-or-volume-based' data rates."
Used by mobile service providers around the world, a single Cisco CSG2 blade can simultaneously manage several hundred thousand active mobile users, and process more than a million concurrent sessions per second, while providing two major new functions that providers need to manage and monetize mobile content services:
. Dynamic mobile content examination and access control – enabling mobile service providers to meet the needs for parental control, satisfy corporate usage policies and comply with social and regulatory requirements; and
. Flexible, application-aware billing – enabling providers to offer differentiated charges for services by volume, duration, event and other parameters.
When the Cisco CSG2 blade is integrated with Kabira Charging 2.0, a service provider can maximize control over its subscriber offerings and infrastructure. Kabira Charging 2.0 offers highly-personalized, granular policy management and charging models based on fine-grained service and subscriber profile data. Moreover, it also enables service providers to maintain subscriber service traffic and sessions, as well as charging transactions, despite back-end billing system overload or connection failures, thus providing a high-quality subscriber experience while protecting service provider revenues.
Kabira Charging 2.0 includes an expanded re-usable module library with features such as Balance Management and Billing Offload. It enables a fully configurable solution for online charging, authorization and policy management that can be extended to support non-conventional needs. Kabira Charging 2.0 uses these modules in numerous business services configurations, such as: on-line event-based authorization and charging for prepaid services, authorization and charging at subscriber and service levels according to price plans defined in subscriber profiles, charging transaction journaling, and more. Also included with Kabira Charging 2.0 is an intuitive web-based administrative and monitoring interface to efficiently manage any number of Kabira Charging nodes.
Kabira Charging 2.0 relies on the high-availability and scalability features of the proven Kabira Transaction Platform, and supports single-server (node) and clustered server deployment configurations. Kabira Charging runs on SPARC architecture servers running the Solaris 10 operating system as well as on x64-based servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.