Deutsche Telekom’s ICSS joins Telarix’s iXLink™ service

Industry-wide intercarrier exchange service improves accuracy and expedites processing time of interconnect transactions between service providers

VIENNA, Va.—May 22, 2007—Telarix, Inc., the leading provider of Interconnect Business Optimization (IBO) and settlement solutions for content providers, IP service providers and global fixed and mobile operators, today announced that Deutsche Telekom's International Carrier Sales & Solutions unit (ICSS) has become the pioneering founding member of iXLink, a global electronic business network for the telecom industry. Founded in conjunction with a number of the world’s largest telecom carriers, iXLink provides a secure, reliable business-to-business information exchange platform that enables service providers to quickly and efficiently access and share business documents among their trading partners.

Deutsche Telekom's International Carrier Sales & Solutions unit (ICSS) is one of the world’s leading service providers, offering a complete range of wholesale solutions and services for mobile and fixed operators, and Internet Service Providers.  The company was recently recognized by Capacity Magazine as Wholesale Carrier of the Year for Central and Eastern Europe.

Today, carriers must manage business connections with hundreds of other international carriers, each of which is sending multiple rate and dial-code change notifications as well as invoices, declarations and dispute letters each month.  These connections or agreements with multiple carriers allow a carrier to exchanging traffic to and from specific countries, cities or regions. However, the lack of widely accepted standards in this business, together with the increasing volume of information exchanged between the carriers, has caused a significant increase in the daily operations workload.  As a result, the costly, labor intensive processes and legacy systems used to manage these interconnect agreements in the past are now struggling to meet today’s dynamic business requirements. 

iXLink, designed as an open service platform for use by all service providers, enables carriers to easily and effectively conduct business with one another.  By electronically exchanging shared data and business documents, carriers can streamline their interconnection management processes as well as reduce the complexity and administrative costs surrounding daily interconnect transactions.   

“ICSS has agreements with more than 700 carriers, each of which is sending invoices, declaration and rate change notifications each month,” said Helmut Angst, Executive Vice President of Deutsche Telekom, ICSS.  “iXLink will automate this process, identifying inconsistent or inaccurate information and enabling our routing and pricing teams to focus on high value business activities rather than spending costly time on data validation.”

One of the first services available through iXLink is the automation of buy and sell transactions among service providers related to international wholesale voice. A typical carrier has agreements with hundreds of other carriers, each of which is sending multiple rate change notifications each month. Each offer can contain pricing from 600 to as many as 1,000 international destinations forcing carriers to track as many as 500,000 details per month.

iXLink address these challenges by offering service providers a powerful offer management and decision support capability to simplify and automate the purchase and sales processes within their wholesale interconnect business.  The service enables service providers to electronically receive price lists from other carriers, eliminating the costly, manual efforts and potential financial risks associated with managing each offer.  Driven by a state-of-the-art analysis engine and a flexible import architecture that supports a wide variety of data formats such as excel and xML, iXLink automatically formats and validates each offer against inconsistent or inaccurate offer information.  The system also enables service providers to apply user defined rules to meet their internal business objectives and provide greater financial management.  The new traffic routes and rates are then made available for networking routing consideration within minutes of receipt from iXLink.  

“We are excited to have Deutsche Telekom's ICSS as the pioneering founding member of iXLink,” said Don Lynch, CEO of Telarix.   “The ability to conduct business efficiently and accurately with multiple service providers, each using different OSS solutions, is an enormous challenge in the telecom industry.  By using iXLink, cost conscience service providers can automate their intercarrier business transactions while reducing the costs and labor associated with managing interconnect operations.”