Highlights :: 

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Unlimited, Extensive and Highly Customizable Products and Account Management
Ceres offers the flexibility and needed provision to support unlimited number of customized products and ratings, enabling service providers to tailor their services according to the market.

Currently supported product types include:

• Prepaid
• Rechargeable Prepaid
• Post Paid
• Limited Credit Post Paid
• Corporate (Group)

Flexible tariff management includes the ability to define and instantly activate new tariffs or promotional offers. Tariff schemes allow the service provider to factor in product type, client location (originating node) time of day, day of week, holidays and promotional offers. New tariffs can be activated instantly or scheduled for a future date for a specific period or duration without affecting service. With support for multiple currencies and time zones, service providers can deploy customized products for any part of the world using one central system. New products can be created within minutes and offered online to customers. Service providers can even create customized products for individual customers.

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Real-time Authentication, Authorization, Accounting (AAA) and CDR Generation
Ceres includes a full-featured advanced RADIUS module that works with all RADIUS-compliant gateways such as Cisco and Quintum voice gateways. This high performance multi-threaded server fully supports the standard as well as Vendor Specific Attributes (VSAs). The power of this module lies in the fact that it is highly customizable to enable a multitude of rich product features such as flexible Interactive Voice Response (IVR) scripts.
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Real-time Charge Accrual, Billing, Ratings and Statistics
Ceres performs high throughput charge application, billing, rating and statistical analysis in real-time. Billing is done for each billable CDR based on set product definitions and ratings. Real-time billing allows the service provider to modify and fine-tune various rating parameters and view the results instantaneously. Ceres tracks service usage and payments in real-time. When service usage reaches a pre-defined limit, the system automatically sends a low balance alert via SMS and email. A voice prompt can also be played to the customer through the IVR, if configured for the product. Once usage reaches the credit limit defined for an account, additional calls are not authorized and existing calls are dynamically disconnected.

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Corporate Accounts with Group Billing
Ceres supports corporate customers with multiple end-user accounts under a single group account. This account can control and add end-user accounts under it while affording full and independent end-user account management through the online self-provisioning interface. A corporate account gets a pool of credit (prepaid deposit or postpaid credit limit) that can be distributed among its end-user accounts or shared between the accounts as a single pool. Individual as well as consolidated invoices are automatically generated and sent at predefined billing intervals.

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Highly Flexible Reseller Management
Ceres provides resellers the capability to independently manage all aspects of end-user accounts under them through the online self-provisioning interface. For the service provider, it provides real-time monitoring and management of resellers’ activities and receivables. For the prepaid industry, when batches of accounts are provided to the reseller on credit, Ceres keeps track of the utilization of accounts (first use and depletion) per batch and alerts when it crosses predefined limits for unpaid batches.

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Web-based Management, Customer Care and Self-Provisioning Interface
Ceres includes an intuitive and comprehensive Self-Provisioning Interface that provides management features for all aspects of the system. All configurations, product creation and definitions, modifications or enhancements, reporting, security and customer service are carried out through this interface. Secure access is provided for all users including end-users, resellers, corporate customers, customer service operators and administrators based on predefined roles and access privileges. Customers can service themselves thereby lowering operational costs for the service provider. The interface easily integrates into the service provider’s web site to instantly provide a storefront for online product purchases. For end-users, it includes easy to use features to reliably and securely:

• Purchase any number of products using the online storefront
• View remaining credit and account balances
• Replenish accounts using secure connections
• Modify existing services that have been purchased
• View or download invoices and call detail records
• Dispute call charges (Call Dispute Management) depending on the service provider

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Online Monitoring and Statistics
Ceres provides a host of real-time tools that monitor and graph critical performance indicators such as quality, utilization and profitability. Vital quality metrics such as ASR, ACD and PDD can be monitored on the basis of a destination, a breakout within the destination, a carrier, a product, carriers within a product, destinations within a product, and any other combination of the above. Additionally, quality alarms can be configured using highly flexible rules to send an alert (email and/or SMS) when any combination of quality parameters degrade below a preset level for any product, carrier, destination, or combination of these three. Alternatively, the alarms can be fed into a trouble-ticketing application.

Similarly, utilization and profitability can be monitored on the basis of a destination, a breakout within the destination, a carrier, a product, carriers within a product, destinations within a product, as well as any other combination of the above. These tools enable quick response to quality degradation and losses. It allows monitoring of peak resource utilization, and thus assists in capacity planning. It also allows help desk operators to manage customer service operations effectively.

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Call-to-Call Profit/Loss Analysis
Ceres provides profit/loss analysis on a call-to-call basis. The service provider can zoom in on the exact calls and destinations that are profitable. More importantly, unprofitable calls and destinations can be instantly revealed so that the service provider can take immediate corrective action. In real time, the effects of these changes can be viewed, and through fine-tuning, achieve optimal profits.

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Highly Customizable Reports
Ceres provides service providers with comprehensive reports including:

• Billing and Accounting Reports
• Revenue & Expenses Reports
• Call reports for End-users, Resellers, Corporate accounts and carriers
• Quality and performance reports

These reports are easily exported into a variety of formats including PDF, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word, HTML or CSV. Leveraging the power of Ceres’s relational database, service providers can generate almost any report in real-time with up-to-date information using third party reporting tools such as Crystal Reports and Oracle Reports.

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Highly flexible rules-based routing
An unlimited number of routing rules can be defined using a combination of all routing parameters for highly granular control. The first matching rule is used to route the call. A prefix of any length can be defined in the rules to match the destination number. Rules can be used even to selectively block calls to a carrier. Currently, Ceres supports the following parameters in routing rules:

• Time of Day
• Day of Week
• Date and Time Series
• Quality of Service (ASR, ACD, PDD)
• Source Carrier
• Automatic Number Identification (ANI)
• Dialed Number Identification System (DNIS)

A matching rule can select carriers and distribute calls among the carriers in the following ways:

Percent-wise Distribution: Calls can be distributed among pre-defined carriers for a particular rule on a percentage basis.

Round Robin: If least-cost routing is selected for a particular rule, calls are distributed evenly among the carriers with the same termination rate for that destination.

Strict Priority List: The service provider can define a list of carriers in decreasing priority to be used to route calls that match the rule.

Least Cost Routing (LCR)