SOLUTION SHEET
VOSS Northbound Integration
Increasing Operational Efficiency and Agility
The power of integration
Delivering critical communication services to enterprise organizations requires operational efficiency and agility to remain competitive and viable. This efficiency and agility is heavily influenced by OSS and BSS processes in use, and the level of integration with the UC platform itself.
Learn how your organization could benefit from the VOSS North Bound Integration (NBI) module, which runs as a service alongside VOSS Automate and provides three critical functions: Control of the billing flow during initial customer provisioning, real-time billing updates once the customer is live, and regular reconciliation between live and billing systems.
Traditionally, integration between live services and the system was provided through a mix of manual efforts, discrete tools, and double entry. Modern systems such as VOSS Automate replace this with tighter real-time integration and full end-to-end process automation; significantly increasing operational efficiency, accuracy, and the ability for the customer to self-provision selected services. VOSS Northbound Integration (NBI) in VOSS Automate provides functions to control the flow of information during initial customer provisioning, monitors for changes to subscribers or their services once the customer is live, and issues real-time updates (billing payloads) northbound for charging.
VOSS Benefits
Introducing VOSS Northbound Integration (NBI)
VOSS Automate provides a single pane view of all UC applications, services, end points, and network infrastructure, offering full feature parity and management – single stack: Microsoft and Cisco) – and user on-boarding through operational workflows (quick add subscriber) or bulk loaders (customer provisioning). VOSS NBI is integral to VOSS Automate, providing integration into billing and other northbound systems through a near real-time REST API. This interface transfers a billing payload that contains information on subscribers and associated services when a change is made to the live system. VOSS NBI can be tailored to the needs of individual providers and their systems through the configuration of this payload.
| VOSS NBI Module | VOSS NBI is a module that runs on the Ubuntu operating system: VOSS NBI consists of the information payload and functions to Extract information on any subscriber or service changes made, Transmit payloads northbound to billing and, to receive status updates back (Call Back). |
| Real-Time Payload | Whenever a change to a subscriber or their associated services / devices takes place, an information payload (which can be tailored to the needs of the receiving OSS/BSS system) is generated in near real-time and sent northbound. The payload contains information on the subscriber, the action taken (Add/Change/Delete), and the set of associated devices and services that have been provisioned or changed. |
| Extract Function | Changes to the live service are detected by VOSS NBI through updates in the VOSS Automate Transaction Log. Once a change is detected, VOSS NBI then uses the standard VOSS Automate APIs to extract subscriber, service and device information and build a payload. The payload is defined in a standard JSON format. |
| Transmit Function | Payloads are sent securely (HTTPS) and over a REST API interface (destination defined in the VOSS NBI configuration file). Payload transmission may be buffered or resent to accommodate underlying network issues or busy northbound systems. |
| Call Back Function | VOSS NBI supports a Call Back function and tracking mechanism, which can be utilized by a northbound system to communicate various status updates or error conditions back to VOSS NBI, against each payload message sent. |
| Provisioning Control and Go-Live Dates | During initial provisioning for a customer, when users are being on-boarded, the information flow maybe disabled: users are automatically discovered as they are built into VOSS Automate and placed into a Pending state (no payloads sent). Once a Go-Live billing date has been agreed with the customer, sites and associated users may then be promoted into a Live state. All subsequent changes will then automatically flow into billing (payloads sent). |
| Access control | Access to VOSS NBI is controlled using secure credentials – the same login details as used for the main VOSS Automate application. |
| Diagnostics |
