MetraTech History
In 1995, prior to founding MetraTech, what became its core team concluded that billing and partner management were the primary bottlenecks preventing their own and many other companies from launching new value-added services and innovative business models. After taking a close look at the then available billing protocols and methodologies, the team realized that existing technologies and approaches did not provide the market with enough agility.

The team thus decided to create a radical, new approach. They set the design bar high: to develop a protocol that would enable services with completely different data profiles and business models to be defined on-the-fly and without coding.

MSIX to XML to SOA
During a brainstorming session, the team had an epiphany. The key to the explosive growth of the Internet was its protocols, HTTP and HTML. These enabled anyone to connect to a website running on any operating system, any hardware, any middleware, and any web server – anywhere in the world. Even more significantly, each user’s experience could be completely unique and completely tailored.

HTML, a derivative of SGML, was simple, extensible, and made use of natural-language identifiers. HTTP enabled trouble-free network connectivity. Shouldn’t it be possible, they concluded, to derive an HTML-like protocol from SGML that enabled network elements and applications to connect to Business Support Systems (BSS) in a similarly seamless fashion?

In 1996, the team developed the Metered Services Information eXchange (MSIX) protocol. It was derived from SGML and used natural-language identifiers to dynamically define and submit service usage. Using HTTP/SSL for network connectivity and security, MSIX transactions could be safely and seamlessly transmitted across corporate networks or the Internet.

The team submitted MSIX to the IETF in 1998, and it was embraced by IP-centric technologists. However, the majority of people with whom we shared it with at that time viewed it as a “stupid idea.” It should be noted that in 1998 the W3C released the first draft of XML, which was also derived from SGML and is substantially similar to MSIX.

Recently, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has become the Holy Grail of the OSS/BSS market and this is exactly what the MetraNet has been doing since 1996.

Applied Imagination™
MetraTech Corp. was founded in 1998. Having previously developed a truly dynamic, service-centric billing protocol, the team set another high design bar – to build a platform that was intrinsically as flexible as XML. The result was MetraNet: the first fourth-generation billing and partner management platform (see Figure 1 below).

Existing product solutions, while claiming to be flexible, are essentially hardwired, resulting in massive costs and significant risks when implementing a customer requirement that the vendor has not explicitly designed its system to support. To solve this fundamental problem, MetraNet was architected to support the invention of new services via a dynamic, metadata-driven engine that provides a custom system without coding or compromising. Since XML was becoming the business language of the Internet and MetraNet’s APIs were XML-based, we chose XML as our metadata implementation technology.

MetraNet, now in version 5.0, is completely metadata-driven. Using MetraNet, a product manager is able to invent a service and enter the Service Definition into a web page. Then, MetraNet will do the rest – dynamically generating a database schema, a workflow, a set of web GUIs, and SOA-compliant APIs in a matter of minutes. These dynamic services have been used for a wide-range of OSS/BSS operations including: rating usage events, supporting advice of charge inquires, calculating revenue shares and commissions, creating accounts, provisioning satellite TV viewing rights, IN-based SIM card activation, etc.

Stupid Network and Stupid BSS
If you are wondering why a true, fourth-generation, metadata-driven, SOA-based platform is profoundly different from a hardwired third-generation platform, you need to look no further than the success of IP itself. Michael Isenberg, in his prophetic white paper, “The Rise of the Stupid Network,” clearly articulated why IP would replace the Intelligent Network (IN).

In summary his thesis argues that the IN is intelligent and therein lies its problem: The IN tells the data what to do. IP, on the other hand, lets the data tell the network what to do. Thus, Isenberg coined the term “Stupid Network” to describe IP.

It is this data-up (“stupid”) rather than network-down (“intelligent”) philosophy that has enabled IP to change the world as we know it. It is also why IP, by definition, is at the core of all SOA and IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) solutions. Isenberg correctly predicted that the “Stupid Network” would lead to services that were “mixed and interspersed at will,” a precursor to IMS Composite Applications.

Third-generation BSS products are conceptually similar to the IN. They are flexible within their defined context, but they have a top-down (“intelligent”) view of the world and run into significant issues when attempting to support requirements for which the system was not explicitly designed.

A fourth generation BSS platform, on the other hand, is conceptually similar to IP. It has a data-up (“stupid”) view of the world resulting in a “tell me what to do” rather than a “I know what you want to do” philosophy. This is accomplished through the pervasive use of metadata which is used to create dynamic SOA-compliant services and the underlying BSS infrastructure (e.g. database schema, workflows, rules, web GUIs and APIs) to support those services. Thus, “IP is to networks as metadata is to BSS.”

A “Stupid BSS” enables service providers to apply the creative services and business model that the “Stupid Network” and IMS promise, namely Applied Creativity.

Market Need
Is there a market need for a metadata-driven, SOA-based platform today? Existing MetraNet implementations prove the point and have already provided a wide range of solutions that no other platform could have achieved without a massive amount of time, cost and effort.

For example:

		Swisscom Eurospot invented a very sophisticated, custom negotiated, dynamically weighted hotspot commissioning model. It was implemented on MetraNet with two people in just over two months.
		EchoStar’s Dish Network had a business imperative to be first to market with an innovative pre-paid satellite TV offering. MetraNet was implemented by four people in 42 days resulting in EchoStar presenting MetraTech with an award for the “Fastest Implementation of a Major IT Project.”
		Premiere Global Services focuses on one-to-one marketing by creating a completely tailored contract for each customer. The company has more than 300 services and 40 million active rates and rules. Using metadata modeling, the implementation team was able to programmatically create the product offerings, subscriptions, volume discounts and migrate the rates and rules via XML in one day. Furthermore, one of the usage-based services had a 121-field CDR and required 67 distinct rating keys.

Market Recognition
Further proof of our approach is MetraTech’s recent award of two of the six 2005 World Billing Awards. Hugh Roberts, consultant director of BSS/OSS events at IIR Telecoms and chairman of the Judging Panel, said:

"We received a very large number of worthy nominations for ‘Most Innovative Billing Product’ and the competition was fierce, so MetraTech’s success in this category is notable. The judging panel believe that their metadata-driven approach represents a significant development in billing methodology and is highly compatible with the evolving role of billing systems to cover end-to-end financial transaction management.

“Most importantly, MetraTech’s approach potentially allows for much greater agility in the development and fulfilment of new business models - a critical requirement in the new generation environment where complex multi-channel services will need to be deployed to ensure service provider profitability. The implementation of MetraNet for Swisscom Eurospot is a good example of this and was one of the most highly regarded of all the nominations we received in all categories. The participants in the project not only faced up to the challenges of complex partner management involved in the Wi-Fi environment but also introduced new and highly effective business logic to allow for intricate, elegant and configurable commissioning structures. All in all a great service provider success story which fully deserved the win in the ‘Best Non-Voice Billing Category’.”

Conclusion
While MetraTech’s modular, dynamic metadata-driven, SOA approach may seem unattainable to some, most Tier 1 service providers thought the same way about IP in the early nineties; “IP, the protocol of the future that will replace the IN? I think not,” they said. No one is having that debate today. IP and IMS are enabling the deployment of services and business models that were previously inconceivable.

Business realities and intense competition continue to validate MetraTech’s innovative, metadata-driven approach to billing and partner management. MetraNet is the platform of choice for companies that demand agility and excellence without compromise.

Were our early critics right about our approach? Ironically, yes – in the same way that most dismissed the notion that IP would replace the IN. It was a “stupid” approach, but they completely missed the point. Although other BSS providers have wrapped their third-generation platforms with XML, they have only put a modern veneer on an architecture that tells the data what to do rather than the other way around.

Michael Isenberg's paper, "The Rise of the Stupid Network"