MTN, one of South Africa`s leading GSM network operators, recently celebrated a subscriber base of over 3 million after selling over 250 000 prepaid and contract sales in the Christmas period alone.
According to project manager for MTN`s outsourced wholesale billing system, Tony Ballard, competition is severe in South Africa and as a result time to market of new products and services are critical in order to acquire and maintain a strong subscriber base. The phenomenal growth of cellular networks and the fast adoption rate of new mobile phone technology in SA has blown all early projections out of the water said Ballard with local consumer awareness and use of mobile phones increasing at an exponential rate.
The competitive nature of this market has highlighted the role played by MTN`s ProIV RAD (Rapid Application Development) toolkit used for its billing system. It can match and bill subscribers for any new products rolled out on the network. This allows as much lead-time as possible before rival products hit the market.
An example of this was the free minute`s concept that the company introduced a few years ago that gave subscribers a number of different free talk minutes a month. This innovation had to have the free minutes offer built into customer`s monthly subscriptions, which was programmed in a matter of months and launched by creating a specialist software billing application using ProIV.
Ballard says ProIV allows the development team of five to roll out new network products and services to consumers twice as fast compared to the time frame possible if only traditional programming languages like Basic C and C++ were used.
A more recent example of this in 2000 was the teams rapid development of an additional prefix number range of 073 raising the potential customer allocation of cell phone numbers from 10 to 20 million, important added space in an expanding African market.
Rob Collier, software director for Business Unusual, the SA VAR for the ProIV toolkit said the language is flexible and stable, vital qualities for mission critical systems like billing and it is also seven times faster than the more conventional Cobol language. He said with MTN processing around 15 million transactions a day there is no margin for error and the speed of ProIV RAD has meant that MTN customers can move onto new network packages quickly through more rapid software development.
Dion Retief, MD of Business Unusual said the key feature of ProIV for MTN is that new ideas like free SMS messaging can be taken to market faster because the billing system can be matched far more quickly compared to networks that use `off the shelf` development packages. He added that the stability and compatibility of the language means that it can be moved onto any new hardware environment without recoding, a key feature for growth as MTN looks toward a whole new range of future products including GPRS, WAP and full 3G wireless functionality.
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