Ceon Unveils Its PCCCeon Unveils Its PCC

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. -- Ceon, a leading provider of product management and fulfilment software for complex and bundled communications services has today announced the development of the industry's first purpose-built product creation and product lifecycle management system for communications service providers.

Ceon Product Control Center (PCC) enables service providers' product and marketing personnel to construct and manage a catalogue of complex product offerings. Ceon PCC automatically searches, iterates and generates valid product possibilities from generic templates using Ceon's patent-pending telecommunications services modelling technology. The software solution also manages the entire lifecycle of product offerings, including managing the implications of changes in constituent components.

IP-transformation and accelerating competition is forcing service providers to be more creative and agile in rolling out new product offerings. Ceon Product Control Center has been developed to meet the product management challenges faced by operators in today's marketplace. For example, a product manager that wants to create a bundled offering from 5 service components, each with an average of 15 options or choices, will have billions of possible solution choices available to him (see executive brief at http://www.ceon.com/pmchallenge.html). Not all possibilities will be valid but, deciding which ones are, is a significant challenge. Ceon's new software solution is designed to handle the underlying combinatorial complexity and product changes in a dynamic environment.

The introduction of the Ceon Product Control Center heralds a major new approach to product lifecycle management for operators, as a single integrated software solution can now be used to manage the cradle-to-grave lifecycle of all product offerings. Until now, product and marketing managers within service providers have relied on paper-based and highly manual processes to support the definition and roll-out of new offerings.More importantly, the processes to handle product changes are incomplete and untimely, and deciding the implications of product changes is a 'best effort ' task. These time-consuming, error-prone and labour intensive processes will no longer work in the new world of exploding marketplace offers that are a mix-and-match of a variety of base services.

Peter Burke, CEO of Ceon commented: "The primary way in which operators can differentiate themselves going forward is around innovative product offerings. We have now reached the age where operators will support a 'supermarket' of products, in terms of choice, lifecycle and speed of delivery. Huge variations of bundled services are being introduced more quickly, with a shorter shelf-life, many of which are linked to events or consumers' lifestyles. Operators already have millions of product items to manage and hundreds of changes per month to contend with, and it is only going to get worse."

Ceon Corp.