The telecommunications industry is operating under an unprecedented pace of change. Global 5G subscriptions reached an estimated 3.2 billion connections in 2025, and operators are progressively shifting their business models toward selling network capabilities — quality-on-demand, network slicing, edge compute, and differentiated connectivity — rather than bandwidth alone. Industry analysts at SNS Telecom & IT project that annual investments in private 5G networks will grow at a compound rate of approximately 41 per cent between 2025 and 2028, surpassing five billion dollars by the end of that period.

For communications service providers (CSPs), this shift represents a significant commercial opportunity. It also exposes a long-standing operational vulnerability: legacy billing platforms. The question facing most operators is no longer whether new services can be introduced, but whether they can be launched quickly, accurately, and at scale, without introducing risk or compromising the subscriber experience.

This is the domain in which Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management (Oracle BRM) has established itself as an industry reference platform. With the right implementation framework, Oracle BRM enables service providers to configure, validate, and scale new offerings with confidence — converting billing from a back-office constraint into a strategic enabler of growth.

Where Oracle BRM Service Launches Tend to Slow Down

Even on a capable platform, several factors can extend timelines and increase delivery risk:

• Architectural complexity: Oracle BRM’s flexibility, while a strength, requires deliberate design choices to support mobile, broadband, IoT, and enterprise offerings on a converged foundation.
• Legacy customisations: Older implementations frequently carry patches, bespoke logic, and undocumented dependencies that add friction to every change.
• Reinventing established models: Delivery teams may build new service configurations from scratch rather than reusing proven, productised patterns.
• Operational risk: Every new launch must be rigorously tested to ensure accurate rating, charging, and invoicing across millions of subscriber accounts.

Addressing these factors deliberately, rather than reactively, is what separates a six-month launch from one that takes eighteen.

Configuring New Services with Oracle BRM

Oracle BRM is purpose-built for telecommunications and media service providers, supporting the full revenue lifecycle from product configuration through to revenue analytics. The platform enables operators to introduce new services rapidly while maintaining the accuracy and auditability that the industry demands.

1. Flexible service configuration: Oracle BRM provides certified conformance to the TM Forum SID model and exposes a web-based Pricing Design Center (PDC) for the design of offers, bundles, and tariffs. This enables operators to define services such as 5G data bundles, over-the-top (OTT) video, family plans, and IoT device connectivity using attributes tailored to commercial requirements, rather than custom code.

2. Comprehensive charging models: The platform supports prepaid, postpaid, hybrid, and pay-per-use models. Online charging – for example, real-time rating of prepaid voice or data is performed by the Elastic Charging Engine (ECE), while recurring and one-time subscription charges are rated by the BRM server. According to Oracle, the platform is architected for extreme real-time performance and is designed to scale to billions of transactions per day, with millisecond latencies enabled by massive parallel processing.

3. Out-of-the-box subscription use cases: Common telecommunications scenarios including shared data pools, promotional discounts, sharing groups, and B2C, B2B and B2B2X subscriber models – are supported natively, reducing the volume of bespoke development required at go-live.

4. Extensibility for advanced requirements: For scenarios such as roaming, converged charging, enterprise service-level agreements, and ASC 606 / IFRS 15 deliverable-based revenue recognition, Oracle BRM provides extensibility across rating, billing, invoicing, and collections without compromising core stability. Recent BRM 15.1 enhancements add contract management features, TMF 622 Product Ordering API support for bill fulfilment, and SSL/TLS communication between rating engines and the BRM Connection Manager.

Migrating from Legacy Billing Systems

For many operators, launching a new line of business presents the right commercial moment to retire ageing billing platforms. Oracle provides a structured migration path through Conversion Manager, an optional licensed component that converts data from any legacy database into the Oracle BRM data model.

Conversion Manager supports the migration of account data, service subscriptions, charge offers, billing data, account hierarchies, and balance data, including data required to manage rollovers. The migration process follows a well-defined sequence:

• Data validation: Subscriber data, usage records, and account hierarchies are audited for consistency before migration begins.
• Data mapping: Source data is mapped to the Oracle BRM schema using XML files validated against published XSD schemas. Oracle provides both conceptual schema files (for mapping work) and physical schema files (optimised for performance during conversion).
• Staged loading: The pin_cmt utility imports data into the Oracle BRM database in a hidden staging area, allowing the import to be reviewed in Billing Care before it becomes available to production processes.
• Deployment: Once validated, the data is deployed by updating the database identifier in each object’s Portal Object ID (POID), at which point billing cycles can be started and cycle fees applied.
• Post-migration validation: Balances, invoices, and entitlements are reconciled to ensure continuity of service and revenue integrity.

For operators carrying years of historical data, Conversion Manager can also be configured to load legacy records into back-dated table partitions, preserving creation timestamps and keeping historical queries performant.

The Business Impact

When the platform is implemented and operated correctly, the commercial outcomes are measurable:

• Faster time-to-market: New 5G, OTT, and IoT services can be configured and launched in weeks rather than months.
• Lower operational risk: Standardised frameworks and pre-built use cases reduce errors in rating, charging, and invoicing.
• Increased agility: Operators can respond to regulatory changes and competitor pricing moves without re-platforming.
• Improved subscriber experience: Accurate, consistent, real-time billing builds and sustains customer trust.
• Revenue acceleration: Earlier launches translate directly into earlier monetisation.
• Long-term resilience: A disciplined Oracle BRM foundation supports successive innovations without restarting from scratch.

A Strategic View

Launching a new line of business should not be a months-long, high-risk exercise. With Oracle BRM, supported by experienced delivery partners and a disciplined implementation methodology, billing becomes more than an operational necessity. It becomes a strategic instrument for monetising new opportunities — from 5G enterprise services and private networks to IoT and converged enterprise offerings — at the pace that today’s market demands.

For organisations evaluating their next move on Oracle BRM, the most important decisions are made before configuration begins: the choice of architecture, the discipline applied to legacy data, and the framework used to reuse rather than rebuild. Done well, these decisions determine whether Oracle BRM becomes a constraint to be managed, or a platform on which the next decade of growth is built.

Aarav Solutions partners with telecommunications operators on Oracle BRM implementation, modernisation, consultation and managed services. For enquiries about new service launches, legacy migration, or BRM Upgrade and optimisation, please contact our team.