Integra Systems partner announces France Telecom providing advanced billing services to business customers

Lucent Technologies` Kenan Systems today announced that France Telecom has implemented the Arbor(/BP billing product for its advanced `Facturation Entreprises` corporate billing system. The billing system will provide France Telecom with significantly increased flexibility and bill consolidation for its most valuable customers--25,000 of France`s largest business customers. The Arbor/BP product is also giving France Telecom the scalability it needs to respond to an immense and rapidly growing customer base through an open systems platform which will help it support huge volumes of call detail records (CDRs).

Using Arbor/BP`s highly configurable, customer-centric architecture, France Telecom expects to quickly introduce customized price plans and new services, including complex account hierarchies, headquarter discounting, consolidated reports and multi-service billing. Also, to better meet the needs of its largest business customers, France Telecom will offer multi-location businesses one bill for all their locations in France by consolidating its 27 regional billing centres into a single nation-wide system.

"In terms of sheer size, Kenan Systems` implementation at France Telecom exceeds all previous UNIX platform billing implementations," explained Paul Hughes, a senior analyst with the Yankee Group. "This demonstrates the scalability and the high throughput capacity of the Arbor/BP architecture, heretofore seen only on a traditional mainframe platform."

UNIX platforms are commonly used as telecommunications billing platforms in the industry. The implementation of the Arbor/BP billing product at France Telecom is the largest known UNIX-based transaction processing system in the world to date as measured by database size. The new billing system has been tested to handle 45 million CDRs within an eight-hour processing window per day - equivalent to 900 million calls per month. While most systems are limited to managing billing traffic on a single server, Kenan Systems` product at France Telecom can accommodate up to 12 Hewlett -- Packard K-series servers running Sybase relational databases with 3 terabytes -- 3.3 trillion bytes- of disk storage.

"In order to respond to competition in our markets, we need a billing solution that can do two things," said Pierre Marie Bussi`ere, group vice president for IT, quality and customer support at France Telecom Branche Entreprises. "First, our billing system needs to be able to handle the huge transaction volumes generated by our business customers. Second, it has to be flexible so that France Telecom can take a truly customer-centric approach, reducing the time to market for new offers and thereby competing more aggressively on service. When we launched our project in 1996, we decided to develop our new billing system using the Arbor/BP solution. Our choice was based on the high flexibility of the solution and we then took a chance with the scalability of an open systems platform. We are now reaping the rewards of this huge human and technical investment."

"The implementation at France Telecom is a tremendous milestone in our company`s history," said Kenan Sahin, president of Lucent`s Kenan Systems. "The immensity and scalability of the Arbor/BP solution at France Telecom will help it provide billing and world-class systems support for its customers. France Telecom is one of the leading carriers to have the foresight to invest in sophisticated customer care systems for its most critical markets, and we are thrilled to be a part of its momentous success."