Complex Data Exchange and Energy, Telecommunications & Utilities

The telecommunications industry continues to seek opportunities to rapidly develop and deploy new products and provide differentiated customer service, including billing across products and lines of business, while driving cost and efficiency improvements.

Addressing these opportunities frequently involves business integration that requires aggregating customer information from diverse transactional systems or streamlining business processes by eliminating barriers, manual re-work, etc. Typical examples include:

Online Customer Self-service
Telecommunications organizations have taken on aggressive initiatives to provide a cross-product view of the customer account, differentiated service options and bill presentment and payment services. Electronic bill presentment and payment (EBPP) solutions in particular have become a critical capability to provide incentive for customer adoption of online channels. EBPP solutions often require complex data conversion of customer billing information from paper bills, legacy systems or print streams to an online format.
Business-to-Business Gateways
Use of business-to-business (B2B) gateways to integrate and streamline processes from customer order, provisioning and billing and payment. For many carriers, use of these gateways involve negotiating the trade-off between the data formats customers are willing to use and adoption and use of the gateway by customers. Customer data formats that are too restrictive may pass on integration costs to customers and limit adoption and use. Yet, the ability to support multiple customer formats hinders data integration capabilities.

Integration projects such as the above become very complex given the extensive industry use of mainframe systems and proprietary implementations such as complex COBOL, industry-specific transaction standards, proliferation of desktop applications resulting in important data residing in unstructured formats in word processing and spreadsheet documents, and an increasing role for XML-based standards. Traditional approaches to complex data integration have required use of multiple technologies that are costly and time-consuming to implement, and are inflexible and difficult to maintain.

Complex Data Exchange Solutions for Telecommunications
Informatica's next-generation complex data exchange technology provides a powerful solution for improving business integration in the telecommunications industry. Specific Complex Data Exchange solution capabilities that address the needs of telecommunications organizations include:

Support for communications with business partners across and beyond the industry using multiple transaction standards such as EDI X.12 and EDIFact.
Support for a broad range of other data formats frequently encountered in business integration including unstructured data (e.g., document formats and print streams) and semi-structured data (e.g., advanced COBOL and proprietary implementations of standards). Click here for a full list of data formats supported.
Ability to embed Informatica data transformation for runtime execution in most distributed software infrastructure platforms including leading integration brokers, content and document management platforms, application adapters, and software applications built on J2EE, Microsoft .NET and native OS environments.

Key Technology Standards Support: