Mobile and broadband operators face unprecedented challenges driven by consumer behavior – with its increasing demand for high bandwidth, network quality and new, over-the-top (OTT) services – and by infrastructure in need of constant repair and upgrades. Managing features, capacities, licenses, access rights and services in this chaotic, fast-moving and increasingly virtual world may appear virtually impossible!
A sophisticated entitlement management system can be invaluable in the complicated telecommunications environment. Unlike a single-purpose license management system, an entitlement management system, in addition to connecting to operational support systems (OSS) in the field, can connect directly to your front-end business support systems (BSS). This allows the entitlement management system to provide both validation to field systems on the features and capacities left in the purchased pool of resources and a path for adding additional features and capacities through billing or immediate purchase.
Entitlement management is the BSS function that facilitates the virtualization on the operational support system OSS side. By moving towards entitlement management, telco’s will be positioned to monitor, verify and track the use of resources, software features and capacities in those virtual environments.
Without the ability to track usage and verify provisioning against customer purchases provided by an entitlement management system, many of the advantages of a virtualized network will remain unrealized.
CHALLENGES:
- Customers must be able to understand the advantages and limitations of each of the packaged products
- System owners must be able to ensure that customers do not use features, capacities and functionality they haven’t purchased
- System owners will want to allow customers to try new features (often initially for free) and easily add the new features to their systems
- System owners will need to provide online-self-managed reporting of usage, entitlements and the ability to manage, move, limit and otherwise control the use and distribution of the entitlements they’ve purchased across the virtual systems
- System owners will need to track licenses that are fixed to hardware across virtual systems supported by that hardware
- Software publishers and service providers will need a mechanism to enforce licenses
THE POETIC SOLUTION:
- Single platform for all your entitlement management needs
- Supports commercial and home-grown licensing technologies
- Available as a private cloud or SaaS offering
- Role-based securities
- Online, check-in/check-out processing of licensed software
- Customer self-service entitlement management
- Subscription tracking and self-service maintenance
- Consumption tracking and reporting
- More than 50 web services for integration
- Localizable and customizable UI
- Single-signon ready
- Sophisticated upgrade management engine
- Batch activation
- Customizable email notifications
