Cloud-Native BSS Transformation Using Oracle BRM 15 PS8 at Telenor Asia

Involved Institutions: Telenor Group – Thailand (DTAC), Malaysia (DIGI), Pakistan, and Bangladesh (Grameenphone).

Provider: Oracle Communications Consulting, in strategic partnership with SOIN Soluciones Integrales S.A. (serving as the LATAM regional expert hub).

Project Year: 2022 - 2023

The Challenge:

Telenor Asia sought to consolidate operations across four countries and 175 million subscribers onto a single cloud-based billing and rating platform. The platform was required to support massive transactional traffic peaks with millisecond-level latency, which was critical to enabling 5G network monetization while ensuring a new customer experience aligned with telecommunications industry’s best practices and guidelines. As part of Oracle’s initiatives to ensure project success, it was necessary to engage top global consultants to deliver this flagship OCI project, which would serve as a reference for Oracle’s strategic positioning within the telecommunications industry. Project execution was carried out concurrently across all four countries.

Our solution:

Given the complexity and scale of the project, Oracle Communications Consulting established a strategic partnership with SOIN to lead an elite team of LATAM-based consultants with deep expertise in the Oracle BRM suite, leveraging SOIN’s strong regional experience in delivering cutting-edge projects and pioneering production implementations of Oracle solutions. Based on this, the SOIN team was integrated into the core of the Oracle Consulting project from phase zero, providing technical and functional leadership across critical streams including OC3C, OCOMC, DGW, ECE, BRM, and PDC, spanning from architecture and low-level solution design workshops, through customization and adaptation to customer-specific requirements (including country-specific variations), to certification during User Acceptance Testing (UAT). As a key milestone, the project achieved the deployment of a 100% cloud-native architecture (Docker/Kubernetes) on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), encompassing the most complete and complex stack available in the market at the time. The solution leveraged the latest Oracle product versions then available, including BRM v15 PS8, and benefited from direct access and communication with Oracle Engineering throughout all project phases to obtain early access to new functionalities. The implemented modules included: • Converged Charging & Diameter Gateway: Implementation of ECE and DGW for real-time balance management and session control, optimized to process thousands of transactions per second (TPS) in real time, ensuring 4G/5G interoperability. • Network & Mediation: Deployment of OC3C for service control and OCOMC for offline mediation, enabling the ingestion, transformation, and normalization of millions of daily usage records from platforms and legacy systems, ensuring the integrity of usage data. • Billing & Revenue Management: Configuration of BRM for billing, collections, and settlement, centralizing revenue management within a single platform and enabling support for B2B, B2C, and B2B2X business models.

Results:

• First Oracle cloud-native convergent rating and billing solution: Delivery of the first Oracle convergent cloud-native rating and billing solution. • Scalability: OCI capacity to support massive subscriber volumes with low latency (milliseconds) and near-linear scalability. • Commercial Agility: Unification of billing and collections, enabling the launch of new offers and customer provisioning without the risk of system desynchronization, significantly reducing time-to-market for commercial offerings. • 5G Readiness: Full digitalization of the technical stack, enabling Telenor to monetize advanced 5G services and network slicing capabilities. • Delivery Capability Proven: SOIN demonstrated solution delivery capabilities at the same level as Oracle Consulting and Engineering SWAT teams, executing complex developments and critical testing activities within the project. • Proven Experience: Demonstrated experience in complex, multi-country, multi-regulatory, and high-availability deployments.

Technologies used:

• Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management (BRM Cloud Native) • Oracle Communications Elastic Charging Engine (ECE) & Diameter Gateway (DGW) • Oracle Communications Pricing Design Center (PDC) • Oracle Communications Convergent Charging Controller (OC3C) • Oracle Communications Offline Mediation Controller (OCOMC) • Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) & Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE) • Java, Unix shell scripts, Oracle PL/SQL, Groovy, C, REST APIs, Docker, CI/CD.