SAP RM_CA and CBRM integration

SAP Revenue Management–Contract Accounting (SAP RM-CA), is a revenue management system that SAP offers to the telecommunications industry, Portal has an integrated solution for SAP RM-CA, telecommunications providers with the challenge of revenue management, such as controlling revenue leakage they experience as they roll out new services. May find this solution quite useful. From the press release:“By integrating the two systems, SAP RM-CA Manager enables you to supplement billing and accounting features available in Portal with additional receivables and collections management capabilities of SAP RM-CA”.

With SAP RM-CA Manager, you can first use Portal’s functionality to perform rating and discounting and run billing for accounts that Portal shares with SAP RM-CA. You can then initiate post-billing and accounts receivable (A/R) activities, which include applying payments, issuing refunds, calculating fees and interests, and so on. You perform most of the A/R activities using SAP RM-CA, while some are performed in Portal.

The billing data accumulates in the Portal database each time Portal runs billing, generally every day. While running billing, Portal generates a bill for each account that has a billing date of the previous day (or earlier if you don’t run billing daily). To finalize the bill, Portal changes the status of the bill items associated with the bill from pending to open. Open bill items stop accumulating charges, which makes applying payments and performing other A/R activities possible.

SAP RM-CA Manager collects all open bill items from the Portal database and transfers them to SAP RM-CA. SAP RM-CA posts them as open items and can now display the accounts’ billed balances and apply payments, issue credits, perform write-offs, and so on.

oracle acquisition timeline

This blog was originally posted in march of 2007 on my personal blog, I have decided to dedicate a separate blog for CBRM and so here it is again to keep it all togather.

Just when we all thought Oracle was done shopping (at least for now)after spending more then $20 billion USD in the last 3 years, we got the news of yet another acquisition, case in point Hyperion Solutions. Starting January 2005 we saw Larry implementing the then new growth strategy which puts vertical market product acquisitions squarely in the center. Oracle believes that for it to reach its 20% growth target for the next 5 years it has to pursue the new strategy as it can no longer rely on just organic growth. Oracle's chief geek executed this strategy by targeting industry segments such as retail, government, and financial services, where key rivals like SAP and Baan have not yet found a huge audience (Baan ERP is now owned by infor and is known as SSA ERP LN, It is basically Baan ERP project "Gemini" that runs on Unix servers).

The only thing left to be seen now is how oracle leverages these pure play acquisitions and makes them work with its core competencies, if Oracle is able to actually deliver on its promise and pull it off, it will be a success story that will be taught in business schools and told in corporate boardrooms for years to come.

oracle acquisition timeline



Just to give an idea of how much depth oracle added to its product suite here is a time line of its acquisitions between 2005 and 2007.

Since I have long been working on Portal Infranet Billing System implementation extension and deployment, therefore that acquisition last year was of particular interest to me, one thing that strikes me immediately is that with Portal Infranet and Siebel, Oracle is now the only enterprise solutions provider that can provide a truly end to end single vendor CRM solution for Telecoms and ISPs, and if you tie in to this equation PeopleSoft, it becomes a solution that can give SAP executives many a sleepless nights.

Just added (Saturday March 31st 2007): I saw another news release regarding Communications Billing and Revenue Management System (CBRM, previously Portal-Infranet) being now available for the Linux platform, I think given that linux is the one of the most deployed web hosting platform, its a very smart move on behalf of Oracle to align themselves with the open source platform, though I think if given the fact that MySql is maturing very nicely and is catching up with many of the features readily available with Oracle, MySQL will be the first database choice for all those willing to host on an open source database.

I guess Oracle's remedy for that is theInnoDB and SleepyCat (Berkeley DB) acquisition. everything has a sale price and Larry seems to always make an offer no one can refuse.