CSG Systems is a leader in billing and customer care technology for cable television, direct broadcast satellite, advanced IP services, and mobile and fixed telephony markets. Serving more than 265 service providers in more than 40 countries and holding 40% of the US market for cable billing services, CSG is a world market leader. It is estimated that 10 billion call detail records are processed through CSG's billing and customer care solutions each month, serving over 150 million subscribers.

"Our role in the enterprise is to provide the four key elements of customer lifecycle management," says Douglas Zone, CSG Systems chief technology officer (CTO) for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). "Firstly, we offer financial management to the end customer including billing, invoicing, credit notes, balance management, real time payment authorisation and prepaid payments. Our business is best known for this. In addition we provide order management as well as customer profile management which enables individual customers to manage their preferences. Finally, we offer services for customer relationship management. Consequently, CSG Systems can provide the enterprise with one clear holistic view of each customer, enabling excellent customer service and tailored sales initiatives."

CSG Systems develops on Oracle9i Database and is currently migrating to Oracle Database 10g. Zone says: "We originally built on Sybase but realised by 1997 that Oracle was becoming the default solution within the market and we anticipated that our customers would be adopting its solutions. The technical advantages of Oracle soon became apparent especially in relation to its performance tuning capabilities. The new toolkit offers extensive facilities for helping customers manage the software."

Since partnering, CSG and Oracle have been engaged in various joint sales opportunities, where the Oracle E-Business Suite has been supplied and integrated with CSG's billing applications within its Kenan FX framework. "The close working relationship with our alliance manager at Oracle means that we can quickly and easily engage with opportunities involving the E-Business Suite," says Zone. "We are also in regular contact with the telco team at Oracle and are currently building a pipeline together in order to support our joint new business strategy."

CSG and Oracle share a vision, as both companies begin to help their customers to migrate to Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs). Over the next three to four years, Zone expects to see CSG's customers and prospects increasingly approach the company in search of advice as to how they can modernise their existing architecture. "We see our partnership as mutually beneficial as both Oracle and CSG come together to recommend joint solutions," he says. "Customers are now looking to renew their architectures. They are moving away from those built five years ago which used Enterprise Application Integration and a best of breed approach: combining provisioning and billing "slaves" under a CRM "master". They're moving to SOA where all applications are slaves to the real business process. We see Oracle as one of the key players in driving towards SOA, where its data hubs and application server make a valuable contribution."

CSG is an Oracle Certified Partner. "Oracle has a very good partner programme that is well built and can be used efficiently," says Régis Collignon, partner manager at CSG EMEA. "We receive good support from Oracle during the sales cycle and often find Oracle already has a strong relationship with a customer or prospect, which is a great advantage. Through events like Oracle OpenWorld, we also receive valuable face to face time with prospects, existing customers and senior executives at Oracle. In addition we recently produced a short movie for the Oracle partner website and we were proud to have Oracle as a key sponsor at a recent CSG CxO event in the Asia Pacific region. This was extremely valuable for us in terms of marketing and brand association. Oracle provides us with many opportunities to raise awareness of our business in the marketplace."

Oracle also supports CSG's product development. "We work closely with Oracle's telco development team to build future architecture in advance of our prospects requesting it," says Zone. "The tuning of the application database is important and Oracle support in that area has been very helpful. We also regularly use the free training offered. Some of the CSG team members are actually becoming Oracle Certified Professionals."

CSG's faith in Oracle is strong. "We've been very happy with Oracle for a long time and believe that Oracle still holds a strong leadership position," says Zone. "I have never heard customers asking to migrate from Oracle and I do not see them requesting alternative databases in RFPs. There is competition for Oracle in MS SQL and DB2, but the market is not telling us to go for those solutions."

The final message Zone wants to send to other ISVs considering a partnership with Oracle is: "Companies should see that there's more to Oracle than just the database. There is compelling technology in the Oracle Application Server, the new hubs architecture and Oracle's environment for creating service portals. Together with Oracle, we're able to provide a complete architecture."