Telecoms software vendor Amdocs has unveiled its bid to bring billing into the 5G and cloud era, in the form of RevenueONE.

The Amdocs marketing team saw fit to describe it as ‘game-changing’ in the headline of the press release. What game that is, whether it needs changing and whether or not this launch does so, we’ll leave to others to establish. The top line is that this is a billing system designed to help operators exploit all the new revenue opportunities we’re constantly being told have been generated by 5G and the move to the cloud.

To flesh out the press release we spoke to Ron Porter, Product Marketing Manager at Amdocs. He explained that 5G, IoT, connected environments, etc create all sorts of new billing opportunities for operators, but legacy billing systems aren’t geared to exploit them. A lot of this comes down to the kind of speed and flexibility that comes with having virtualized functions in the cloud, especially the edge. He concluded that the ultimate aim was to offer a billing system that is ‘future ready’.

“Amdocs RevenueONE brings together proven scalability and cloud-native architecture to accelerate the launch of new 5G services, while supporting existing products and offers, said Anthony Goonetilleke, Amdocs President of Media, Network and Technology. “At its core, the RevenueONE blueprint was built to scale, and was proven to support 200 million subscribers on a single platform.  This robust architecture allows CSPs to handle the velocity of new service launches, and the variety of new business models, that will come with 5G, while cutting time to market from days to minutes.

“Our goal was to continue to significantly reduce our hardware footprint while scaling to support the influx of new connected devices and services. Utilizing edge-based architecture to reduce network traffic, we believe RevenueONE will grow with our customers as consumers embrace new business models and services.”

The BSS/billion/digital transformation space is pretty competitive at the moment, with various vendors queueing up to giver operators the tools to capitalize on their 5G investments. If products like RevenueONE enable even half of what they promise the onus, as ever, is on operators to adapt the way they do business. 5G is still at an early stage, but the winners of it will surely be those operators that use it as a platform for genuine innovation.