ADWEA selects Oracle to automate billing and customer service

Abu Dhabi Water and Electricity Authority has implemented Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing, which is expected to enhance customer service, streamline business processes and accelerate revenue collection.

Oracle provides a modernized user interface that helps the Abu Dhabi Water and Electricity Authority (ADWEA) call center representatives to process customer requests. The bilingual Arabic-English capabilities inherent in the Oracle application provide the ADWEA with flexibility that simplifies hiring and training new staff.

With Oracle, the ADWEA provides its customers with accurate utility bills based on systematic meter-reads that include supplementary consumer information concerning rates and other services. The ADWEA has also improved its business processes to accelerate bill printing and distribution and shorten its payment collection cycles.

Saeed Nassouri, project manager at the ADWEA, said: "Oracle offers us the flexibility to access a single customer view and use that information to accelerate our service delivery and billing processes. Even more importantly, Oracle provides a scalable foundation for us to fully automate our metering and billing operations."

Source: Datamonitor

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Oracle rolls out CRM features ahead of OpenWorld

Oracle has issued a number of CRM-related announcements ahead of its OpenWorld conference being held next week in San Francisco.

The database and business systems behemoth is taking its PeopleSoft and Siebel CRM applications mobile and issuing a new release of Contact Center Anywhere.

In partnership with Jersey City, N.J.-based Antenna Software Inc., Oracle is releasing a mobile application for organizations running PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM on BlackBerry, Palm or Windows mobile devices. AMPower Sales for PeopleSoft Enterprise includes out-of-the-box account, opportunity, contact, lead, calendar and task management, one-click calling/email and over the air application deployment and updates. The application is available for both on-demand and on-premise licensing and runs on PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM 8.9 and 9.0.

Oracle's latest Siebel CRM application on the BlackBerry platform now enables Siebel CRM Mobile users to access Siebel CRM applications securely from BlackBerry smartphones. It provides an additional level of integration beyond the existing BlackBerry Browser access, a result of collaboration between Oracle and Research In Motion.

The latest release of Oracle's hosted contact center software Contact Center Anywhere 8.1.1 includes administration and platform management enhancements. It also features better bandwidth usage between client applications over the Internet and LAN and optimizes network usage by routing voices through the core systems as needed. New system level reporting allows administrators to better monitor and track changes to the system configuration and user interface enhancements.

Author: Barney Beal @ SearchCRM.com

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Hong Kong's City Telecom Ltd. Selects Oracle Communications for Next-Generation Billing and Revenue Management Platform

Oracle today announced that City Telecom (HK) Ltd. (CTI), a leading provider of telecommunications services in Hong Kong, has selected Oracle(R) Communications Billing and Revenue Management software to provide a billing and revenue management platform that will help address rapid business growth and increase variation in service offerings and pricing options. The new platform will help CTI centralize and manage revenue streams across services, networks, partners, technologies and payment methods, ultimately enabling faster time-to-market and enhanced quality of service.

Since the introduction of broadband Internet services by its wholly-owned subsidiary, Hong Kong Broadband Network Limited (HKBN) seven years ago, CTI has strived to provide end-to-end, world-class residential and corporate voice and data services. In September, CTI launched Hong Kong's first residential Fiber-To-The-Home (FTTH) broadband services at symmetric 100 megabits per second (Mbps), 200Mbps and 1 billion bits per second (Gbps). Earlier this year, CTI introduced bbBOX, a multimedia sharing application converging Internet, television and computers. As CTI continues to expand and innovate, the company needs an integrated platform to provide an immediate, comprehensive view of all company revenue with the ability to drill down into detailed customer service preferences, usage patterns and transaction histories. "Service innovation is key to our company's development of new revenue streams and the group's sustainable growth. For this reason, it is vital that we understand our customers so we can provide more value-added, personalized services to boost their satisfaction. A highly reliable, scalable billing and revenue management platform is a critical part of our strategy for staying ahead of the competition and embracing growth opportunities," said Stephen Chang, chief technology officer of CTI. Chang added, "We chose Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management for its functional richness, flexibility and scalability, as well as Oracle's proven track record for delivering an end-to-end software solution for many of the world's largest and most innovative service providers. When the implementation is complete, we plan to leverage the full 360-degree view of the customers to support further innovation in service offerings while reducing the total cost of ownership. This will enable us to decrease our time-to-market in rolling out innovative services and offerings."

In addition to Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management's support for the entire revenue management lifecycle and its ability to recognize revenues from service usage in the balance sheet, CTI will also benefit from the application's rich support for partner accounts. The
application will manage royalty calculations and revenue sharing agreements and create various settlement and sponsorship arrangements to optimize relationships with business partners, such as content service providers. This functionality will help CTI simplify partner settlements and support the company's rapid triple-play service expansion. "Oracle is committed to providing best-in-class applications that deliver next-generation capabilities for communications service providers. We are pleased to work with CTI to deliver a comprehensive, innovative solution that will enable the company to maximize customer and partner value and drive profitable new business in the years to come," said Dr. Weiming Li, vice president, Japan and Asia Pacific, Oracle Communications. Established in 1992, City Telecom (HK) Limited (SEHK: 1137; Nasdaq:
CTEL) provides integrated telecommunications services in Hong Kong. City Telecom's wholly owned subsidiary, Hong Kong Broadband Network Limited (HKBN), is in the process of expanding its Metro Ethernet from 1.4mn to 2.0mn homes pass. HKBN has achieved an aggregate Voice, Broadband (symmetric 25Mbps up to 1Gbps), IP- TV and Corporate data services base in excess of 640,000 subscriptions. Additional information on City Telecom (HK) Ltd. can be found at http://www.ctigroup.com.hk.

Source: Oracle Corp.

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