That would be accounts RECEIVABLE, not accounts PAYABLE. Accounts payable deal with your suppliers, not your customers.
"Receive" is getting from others, i.e. your customers. "Pay" is to others, i.e. your suppliers.
Where the rubber meets the road: SOA-based systems widen service reach in fast-moving markets (Photo: Michael Kanellos, CNET)
No one ever accused accounts-receivable departments of being on the creative edge, but perhaps, with the growing diversity and demands of customers, they need a dose of innovation. And that dose may be coming from SOA. Designing systems along service-oriented lines may be bringing out the creativity in mobile phone billing departments, Rich Karpinski reports.
With mobile services booming across the globe, especially in fast-growing markets in India and China, telecom providers are scrambling to find new ways to bundle service packages that will keep pace with customer demand. As Karpinski puts it: “deployments are being enabled by new Web 2.0 and service oriented architecture (SOA)-driven approaches and on cheaper, more powerful general purpose hardware that makes rolling out new billing and charging overlay schemes — as opposed to yesterday’s monolithic billing systems — easier and cheaper than ever.”
The ability to mix and match offerings — supported by a flexible underlying architecture — may provide a competitive edge against more traditional flat-rate and post-paid mobile billing plans. Large telecoms operating in emerging markets are able to roll out “real-time charging” and “subscriber and network management platforms to roll-out concepts — such as per-second billing or real-time promotional offers.”
A few years back, The New York Times described how India was becoming the fastest-growing cellular market in the world, thanks in no small part to creative bundling plans that have made the services available to wide parts of the population.
