Core Billing and Rating Modernization: BRM/ECE Upgrade to BRM 12/15 – Cloud-Native BRM ECE

Involved Institutions: Instituto Costarricense de Electridad (ICE)

Provider: SOIN Soluciones Integrales S.A.

Project Year: 2023 and 2025

The Challenge:

The client, a leading telecommunications and energy institution in Costa Rica, had been operating its Billing and Revenue Management platform on Oracle BRM version 7.5 for more than five years. This version presented significant technological obsolescence, scalability limitations, restricted integration with modern cloud-native architectures, and a sustained increase in operational and security risks. The challenge extended beyond the critical upgrade of the core billing system to Oracle BRM version 12—which represented a five-version leap—to the comprehensive modernization of the entire rating and billing ecosystem. The objective was to prepare the platform for network evolution toward 5G, where the system must perform real-time rating and billing for millions of daily transactions associated with highly complex products and services.This transformation needed to preserve the integrity of millions of historical records, maintain interoperability with satellite systems, and comply with the demanding operational windows of a mission-critical telecommunications environment. The overarching goal was to strengthen operational resilience, improve high availability, enable maintenance activities with no service disruption, and allow the business to respond more agilely to market dynamics.

Our solution:

As Oracle’s strategic partner, SOIN designed and executed a comprehensive modernization plan that included: • Core and ecosystem evolution: modernization of the billing and charging core and ecosystem (BRM, ECE, PDC, OCOMC, OC3C). • Detailed assessment and planning of the BRM ecosystem, customizations, business flows, and integrations, defined from the outset under a cloud-native approach. • Design of a logical and technical architecture prepared for containerization, horizontal scalability, and future cloud migration. • Phased migration with controlled development and quality environments. • Modernization of customizations and extensions, ensuring compatibility, standardization, and optimization on BRM 12. • Execution of functional, performance, and load testing focused on critical billing processes. • Training and knowledge transfer to ICE technical and operational teams, incorporating concepts, tools, and practices aligned with modern architectures. • Adaptation and validation of interfaces with satellite systems. • Extensive volume and performance testing under complex commercial scenarios. • Planned and successful production go-live executed with no business impact. • Implementation of a rating infrastructure in an active-active configuration across geographically separated production nodes.

Results:

• Fully modernized billing and charging ecosystem implemented on Oracle BRM 12 and 15. • Guaranteed operational continuity with no impact on customer services. • Technology foundation prepared for cloud-native architectures, while operating on-premises. • By addressing structural, functional, and logical architecture changes as part of the BRM 12 and 15 project, the future evolution from on-premises to cloud is now projected as a predominantly infrastructure-driven initiative, significantly reducing risk, timelines, and complexity. • The BRM 12 project established the architectural, technical, and knowledge foundations for a cloud-native approach, while the evolution to BRM 15 consolidated a modern, resilient, active-active platform, ready for 5G and with substantial improvements in time-to-market. • Initiation and enablement of a continuous upgrade process for the billing and rating platform (BRM/ECE/PDC/OCOMC/WSM), significantly reducing upgrade risk. This process remains active today; as of 2025, BRM/ECE version 15 is in production, enabling annual upgrades with no operational or functional business impact. • First worldwide operation of BRM v15 in a fully convergent prepaid and postpaid active-active configuration. • Platform fully prepared for 5G services. • High availability, operational resilience, and maintenance activities with no service disruption.

Technologies used:

• Oracle Billing and Revenue Management (BRM) • Oracle Pricing Design Center (PDC) • Oracle Communications Elastic Charging Engine (ECE) • Oracle Communications Charging Cloud (OC3C) • Oracle Communications Offline Mediation Controller (OCOMC) • Unix • Java • Shell Scripts • Oracle PL/SQL • Oracle Database