This means an increasing amount of offers that often need to be defined, launched and updated across multiple catalogs, which has a detrimental impact on time to market, for operators relying on legacy charging and billing systems. 

More than ever, in the high speed data era, lengthy service introduction cycles often result in missed revenue opportunities and potential customer losses. This has placed accelerating time to market on the top priority list for most mobile operators.

In a recent survey (Charging and Billing for the Digital Economy, Openet, 2013), 79% of operators viewed a centralised offer catalog as the most successful strategy to accelerate time to market. This was immediately followed by centralised, convergent charging and the ability to configure offers with minimum involvement from vendors.

An effective centralised offer catalog provides a central point for the definition and creation of new offers, campaigns and bundles  – without external vendor assistance;  an offer being a price plan, top-up, add-on or promotion that has associated balances, priorities, threshold rules and notifications.

A centralised offer catalog enables operators to greatly simplify the offer development process and significantly save time. As a result, campaigns and bundles can be rolled out much faster to keep ahead of the competition and better seize revenue opportunities. This approach not only reduces time to market but also results in cost savings as the number of systems to manage and maintain can be reduced to one.

More and more operators, such as T-Mobile Netherlands, are deploying a centralized offer catalog in conjunction with convergent real-time charging to enable rapid innovation and faster time to market.