By Shireen Dee

TMCnet Contributing Editor

 

Kabira Technologies recently announced its inclusion in Cisco's (News - Alert) Technology Developer Program. To qualify as a member of the Technology Developer Program, Kabira fulfilled requirements of an enhanced memory-resident, highly available convergent charging platform which is capable of supporting a direct interface with Cisco Content Services Gateway 2nd Generation (CSG2).

 

Kabira (News - Alert) Technologies is a provider of "extreme transaction processing" software for large enterprises. Its enhanced charging product runs on multi-core servers from Sun Microsystems with the Solaris 10 operating system, or X86-64-based servers with Red Hat (News - Alert) Enterprise Linux version 5 and is capable of directly connecting to Cisco CSG2 blades on both Cisco Catalyst 6500-series switches as well as Cisco 7600-series routers.

 

With present day carriers facing several drawbacks that include a large subscriber base, very high volumes of call data records (CDRs) and also the vital requirement of providing support to multiple diverse data services at varying price points, the most challenging of these drawbacks is the fact that these price points differ by time of day, available bandwidth, subscriber account type, handset configuration and various other such factors.

 

The Kabira Charging product in combination with Cisco's CSG2 will provide solutions to such problems by allowing carriers to not only efficiently implement and deliver latest on-line services, but also accurately charge for these high-value on-line services, thus improving the end-user service experience.

 

"The combination of Cisco's CSG2 and the Kabira Charging product enables carriers to quickly implement, deliver, and charge for new high-value on-line services, reduce over-the-top revenue losses, improve end-user service experience, and enhance real-time fraud reduction capabilities," remarked Chris Clabaugh, vice president of business development at Kabira.

 

Another challenge faced by carriers is that traditional mediation and charging systems apart from being highly constrained also depend on expensive databases, servers, and clustering technologies for supporting next-generation networks and services, thereby making it a very costly task.

 

"To maintain the degree of extreme performance and flexibility Cisco's CSG2 offers, it's essential that the billing mediation agents and quota servers working with CSG2 perform at the same level," Clabaugh added.

 

At the same time, since carriers believe that in order to retain customers, continual introduction of new products and pricing plans is essential. They have also realized that deployment of the Kabira Charging product with Cisco's CSG2 will assist them in meeting the drastic growth of on-line and real time content access marketplace while earning their share.