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Ericsson is now one of the sponsors of the GBA, a non-profit association focusing on the communication billing sector. The GBA's mission is to help communications companies maximize the efficiency of the whole billing process; assess the impact of new services and technologies, and fully understand the issues surrounding them; and promote billing issues and the importance of billing to senior decision makers.

Jaco Fourie works with business development at Ericsson and is the company's main GBA contact person and driver of the relationship. He says: "Our ambition is to be very active and drive the GBA's next-generation thinking."

Alex Leslie, CEO of the GBA, says: "We are delighted that Ericsson has joined the GBA as a sponsor. I look forward to its input into some of the key work the GBA is doing, particularly in the area of next-generation charging."

Revenue Management includes everything that operators have to do to charge and get paid for traditional telecom as well as new multimedia services. It covers both the relationships with customers (retail) and partners (wholesale).

Revenue management solution must be able to handle retail issues such as giving users flexibility to select the price plans that suite them and to keep control of their spending. Operators must have tools to identify the most profitable and attractive pricing and packaging of services. They must also be able to charge on the basis of content, location, subscription, volume airtime and quality, as well as support various offerings like flat fee pricing, package pricing, cross-service discounting, special promotions, and loyalty and bonus schemes.

Wholesale aspects include paying and getting paid by partners for roaming, interconnect as well as content.

The GBA's next-generation revenue-management initiative focuses on all aspects of the transition to IP, the convergence of pre-paid and post-paid environments, and new businesses resulting from convergence within the industry.

Real-time charging, Fourie says, is critical for operators when evolving and converging their revenue-management solutions to handle the challenges and leverage the business opportunities in the new communication industry.

Ericsson is a leading provider of revenue-management solutions, Fourie says, and the market leader in real-time charging solutions. "This gives us a responsibility to the industry to join the GBA and work with other companies, forming the GBA roadmap for the future. We want to ensure that GBA considers all aspects that we as a telecom company see as important."