BillRun® Technologies was established as a corporation in late 2012. BillRun®'s founders identified a clear need to challenge existing BSS providers, due to the significant changes in the Telecommunications market, such as new market entries, simplification of services, shift toward more data services and the OTT effects.
BillRun® took a revolutionary approach and decided to build all their development efforts on the Open Source Approach. In addition, the team tested a large set of innovative technologies and selected the most applicable for the development, from the ‘ground up’ of a new billing system. They considered various aspects that nowadays look obvious, such as Big Data enablement, Scale-out, short time to market, Extendibility, Security and other factors.
Design Principles/Architecture
BillRun® started designing a Billing solution that is based on key differentiators from other BSS providers. There were, at the inception stage few key design principles:
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Open Source - Developing an Open Source solution is in many aspects, a different development method. Its foundations are - usage of other other Open Source tools and products, code sharing with the community of developers and getting feedback from them, and - differentiating between ‘Community’ releases and ‘Enterprise’ releases, the latter ones containing features requested by relatively large-scale operators.
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Scale-out - One of the key technologies adopted by BillRun® is Scale-out. Scale out is horizontal and linear addition of compute resources with the growing number of subscribers or transactions. Scale-out technology, besides its efficient scalability, is predictable and allows the customer to plan ahead. Another key advantage of this technology is the usage of ‘standard’ and ‘commodity’, mainly, hardware components.
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Elasticity - most of the BSS solutions in the market rely on old relational databases. These databases were most popular and, de-facto, the standard of commercial systems during the last decades. Still, in the last few years, a new breed of databases started to emerge. Among these databases, are ‘Document Databases’, ‘Graph Databases’, ‘Key-Value DBs’ and advanced Relational DBs. These new databases were developed to handle the vast amount of data that the traditional, old databases couldn’t handle due to the amount and to the ‘unstructured’ nature of the data, coming from multiple, dynamic sources that relational and structured DBs cannot handle. BillRun® team selected mongoDB as the main repository for BillRun® Billing and MySQL/MariaDB for BillRun®CRM.
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Agility - BillRun !® team has managed to develop a full scale Billing solution, convergent, prepaid and postpaid, for Telecom operators, IoT providers, and other industries, including the fastest OCS [Online Charging System] Engine in a fragment of time it took the more established BSS providers, thanks to a strict development methodology, Scrum agile.
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Speed - Using and leveraging all the design principles described above, allows BillRun® team to deliver developments at a fragment of the time it takes to other providers.
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Security - Using and leveraging all the design principles described above, allows BillRun® team to deliver developments at a fragment of the time it takes to other providers.
