real-time billing

Realtime Financial Processing

The Azure Suite consists of a number of modules combining to form a flexible real-time financial and billing platform. The suite forms the core of transaction based systems in high-volume environment.

Azure is designed to participate in a transaction-oriented environment where different systems and application generate events that need to be rated and billed as they happen. The system supports the ability to automatically calculate product costs according to various pricing schemes and to calculate the distribution of rebates. The platform is based on a highly available core infrastructure that can scale according to redundancy and capacity requirements.

Billing

The billing module generates and updates financial documents specific to your customers, suppliers and products. It is responsible to interpret the rules and various product definitions to determine how documents are affected by events and transactions. The Billing engine aggregates these events for each financial period before costing them and applying them the Accounting System or in the case of a real-time environment, it will cost transactions to determine their value and authorise them based on external payment system authorisation.

Costing

This module calculates the financial values associated with transactions. It can cost documents such as invoices and purchase orders and apply deals to determine the final values. The costing engine executes different financial formulae such as tax definitions, deal distributions and item summations specific for each document or transaction type.

Application Interfaces

These APIs enable external systems to interact with Azure. The APIs support a set of Java objects used to submit events into Billing, Authorise Payment and interact with the Account Management Module.

Account Management

This module enables you to track balances, record financial transactions and run a real-time subscriber management system. It is tightly linked to the Billing and Costing modules. The Accounts module uses customisable posting rules to determine how financial source documents affect the accounts. The output of the rules engine is a list of financial transactions according to posting rules. These rules affect how individual accounts are affected by the values calculated by the costing engine. You can use these accounts to create a flexible and highly scalable mobile subscriber system. Accounts can track authorisations and available amounts used by the Application Interface and Payment Processing Modules.

Payment Processing

The payment processing module interfaces with the Crimson Financial Messaging module and enables you to process subscriber payments as defined on the subscriber definition. This module supports standard credit card payments, Online Billing and custom back-ends.

Why Azure?

• Robust platform. Azure is built on a Carrier-grade infrastructure using OTP2 technology. This ensures a quick deployment process on all supported platforms. Azure runs natively on Sun Solaris™, Linux and Mac OS X™.
• Scalability. Azure can scale to large fault-tolerant dimensions by adding additional nodes and instances. To increase throughput, the costing calculations can be offloaded to slave calculation nodes. Additional Primary Nodes can be added as required.
• Role-based Security and User Management. Create users, groups and assign rights to different system features. Users accessing the Management Interface is authenticated before the system allows access. CAP2 includes password strength checking and expiry policies.
• Reliable Messaging. All the Azure modules communicate using fully transaction persistent queues. This ensures that major modules are de-coupled from each other eliminating synchronous call constraints while maximising concurrency and throughput. You can monitor the state of the processing queues using SNMP or CAP2.
• Currency Support. All the modules in Azure support multiple currencies. You can specify the default currency for your organisation and run different currencies for each of the customers.