European MVNO group Lebara picks Openet cloud charging platform

Irish BSS vendor Openet has chalked up a nice win with MVNO Lebara to sort out its charging systems in five European countries, including the UK.

This gig is all about the cloud, it seems with Openet’s Evolved Charging Suite residing in the AWS cloud and being managed by Rackspace. Openet is one of the BSS vendors most invested in concepts like digital transformation and ‘cloud native’ so this win would appear to be a vindication of that approach.

“The cloud-native charging system from Openet gives us so much flexibility in how we develop, rate and monetise services,” said Lebara CTO Torsten Minkwitz. “This, combined with our passion to deliver an amazing customer experience, will provide Lebara with a platform for growth.”

“We’re honoured that Lebara has selected Openet to provide real-time charging for its business in Europe,” said Paul Saunders, GVP of Sales at Openet. “The investment we made in re-designing our software to be truly cloud-native is paying off as our partners, like Lebara, will benefit from significant efficiency gains and cost savings that can be made by embracing cloud-native technologies. Openet looks forward to a long and successful relationship with Lebara and AWS.”

“We look forward to working with Lebara and Openet to help both companies leverage the value of the cloud and microservices based architecture so that Lebara can bring new products to market faster, introduce new business models, and deliver excellent customer experience while reducing its IT operating costs,” said Kyle Lichtenberg, Worldwide Partner Technology Lead at AWS.

That, of course, is what this obsession with the cloud is all about – speed and flexibility. MVNOs tend to focus on the pay-as-you-go market, which is more volatile and experiences higher churn. Since the basic underlying costs are similar for all of them, some of the best opportunities for differentiation would appear to be through tariff and charging innovation of the kind this software is designed to enable.