The charging engine is the core part of any billing solution. Extreme
flexibility combined with scalability and high-performance throughput assure
that revenue can be generated as quickly as possible after the chargeable
event has taken place.
The
charging engine determines the billable entity – typically a customer - for the
events or transactions it receives and identifies the tariff structure based
upon the entity’s price plan and the type of events received. The events are
charged and sent to output.
While
the origins of the Charging Engine lie in telecommunications it is completely
independent of any industry and supports charging of generic transactions of any
type of billable entity. Examples are: electricity, fintech, SaaS and other
transaction based business models.
Transparent charging information provides all technical and pricing details for
a charged event, including revenue sharing information.
Individual metrics are configurable on any available data field and require no
programming.
Dynamic
rate adaptation on any level allows for real-time charging and discounting and
avoids recalculation of rates and discounts at bill time. This also supports
corporate hierarchies and flexible durations like daily packages.
The
charging engine operates with multiple parallel processes for highest
performance.
A
system for 10-20 mill. transactions per day operates with one data reader, one
data writer, 4 precharge processes and 16 charge processes.
Input
sources can be text or binary files as well as databases. Output can be written
to relational or no-SQL databases. Internally the charging engine uses a highly
optimized tag-value format that both provides flexibility and avoids storage
overhead.
Currently supported platforms:
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Unix (HP, IBM), Linux
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Oracle, Mongo DB