Globetom Wins SPII Grant to Develop Convergent Prepaid Platform

 

Globetom has been awarded an SPII grant for innovation under the Support Programme for Industrial Innovation (SPII) for the construction of a comprehensive convergent prepaid platform. This programme is administered by the Industrial Development Corporation.

 

The product development already commenced in May 2007 immediately after the application was lodged with the SPII. Globetom is earmarking the product development for completion of phase one by middle December in preparation for potential product trials early in 2008.

 

“While the product will have a specific telecommunications industry bias and will conform to the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) online charging system architectural reference models, the solution will also be generic enough to use as subscriber and customer management, service rating and balance management platform for prepaid businesses outside of the telecommunications industry,” says Philip Stander, Chief Technology Officer of Globetom.

 

“Globetom has identified the development of a highly scalable prepaid billing platform that moves convergent load away from the traditional telecommunications network and systems elements as a key gap in the market that it plans to play in,” says Bheki Nkomo, Globetom Chief Executive Officer.

 

GlobeTOM management added that it is basing the solution on its already established Globetom Grid Enterprise Foundation, which delivers 100% horizontal scalability of any of its product offerings with the added benefit of running on commodity hardware.

 

The project also includes comprehensive integration with the market-leading HP Internet Usage Meter (IUM) product that will ensure that the Globetom Prepaid Platform is able to fulfil the convergent billing requirements of a wide range of network and systems elements already covered by the HP IUM product. “We are very excited about this involvement with HP. We are also planning to have the platform benchmarked at one of the HP Benchmark Centres to prove the horizontal scalability of the solution,” Nkomo added.

 

“The SPII grant will assist Globetom as a qualifying small enterprise (QSE) and black-owned company to go to market with a product that plays in the heart of convergence,” says Nkomo. “We already have key strategic market initiatives and relationships set up that should realise very early market penetration.”