Seamless Service and Resource Provisioning Spanning Multiple Service Providers

Service bundling often entails technical dependencies between the individual services. Infonova has been extended to enable the definition of service dependencies spanning multiple service providers, thus ensuring automated fulfilment of multi-service provider service bundles. Service dependencies are defined through the capabilities that a service provides or requires.

Typical scenarios for this functionality are:

A mobile service which needs information from the SIM card supplier before being able to activate the service on the mobile network
A DSL service which needs an activated fixed line connection from another service provider before it can be provisioned

To give a more detailed example: A tenant provides virtual machines and a second tenant provides a database server service which requires a successfully provisioned virtual machine as prerequisite.

1. Customer orders a Database server which consists of two services:

Database server
Virtual machine

2. Infonova decomposes this order into a service order on Tenant 2 for the virtual machine and a service order on Tenant 1 for the database server.

3. Infonova sends the service order to the IaaS Platform and waits for completion. It then sends back the IP address to Tenant 1.

4. After receiving the IP Address from the depending service, the service order is started and sent to the service platform.

Extension of Standardised Open APIs

Standardised Open APIs are a key enabler to seamlessly integrate into a landscape of existing IT systems and partner solutions. Standards-based APIs significantly reduce system integration costs and implementation time when delivering solutions involving several technology vendors.

For Infonova R6, particular emphasis lies on:

A strong decoupling of integration and extension from the core product
No customisation of the core product
Seamless updates & upgrades

The suite of standardised APIs has been extended to include the following functional areas:

Payment API

The Payment API is used for registering and transferring payments.

Debt Collection API

The Debt Collection API provides an interface to manage billing accounts in the debt collection process and the rules governing the path through this process. Using the Debt Collection API, 3rd party systems can manage billing accounts that are negligent when paying their bills.

Billing API

The Customer Bills API enables retrieving the list of customers’ bills and the data of individual bills.

The Billing Process API contains a resource for customer bill cancellation.

Standardised Integration to Other Vendor Authentication Systems

Established businesses often have their own authentication system (e.g., LDAP or Microsoft Active Directory) and therefore do not require the Infonova Operator Management module. With Infonova Version 8.1, authentication systems from other vendors can easily integrate with Infonova via a standardised interface. This enables our clients to use their existing authentication system to manage operator logins to Infonova instead of managing operators within the Infonova Operator Management.

Harmonious Extension of Core Parameters

Infonova provides a comprehensive set of parameters for offers, services and resources. In some cases, clients need to extend these parameter sets to include business-specific parameters of their own. With version 8.1, Infonova now provides a simple and consistent way to define custom parameters for orders, offers, services and resources, without requiring any customisation.

Please note that Release 8.1 is released in combination with the following independent artefacts:

Installer 3.0

Technology Framework 1.0

GDPR Tool 1.3

Infonova Version 8.1 released