Customer care and billing systems are now an essential requirement for operators in the world of new media and telecommunications. The Internet offers these operators potential new ways of doing everyday business and supplying their services, while at the same time presenting many new business opportunities.

New competitors entering now deregulated markets and subscribers demanding ever new and better services regularly lead telephone, cable TV and Internet Service Providers around the globe to reconsider their old business methods. In addition to access, many operators increasingly provide 'content' telematic services such as E-mail, Web, E-Commerce and multimedia stream.

Customers now possess freedom of choice and for operators, differentiation of services is paramount to their business success. In the competitive new media market the operator who provides a new service or new method of service delivery gains the advantage.

Operators, now more than ever, need to effectively manage the new media services they provide, while responding to frequently changing business needs. Operators must now as a matter of course, accurately estimate and track the use of their services, ensure availability and offer customer support.

In the new media marketplace, customer focus is essential for the service provider attempting to minimalise their percentage of lost customers. Old customer care and billing systems can no longer meet the demands placed upon them by the Internet-led arena.

Massive increase in newcomers to the Internet, requires Service Providers to provide customer care and billing systems to scale, to manage the single processor computer to entire (system) networks of (multiprocessor computer) systems. Such diverse demand dictates that Service Providers are obliged to adopt new generation customer care and billing software, that can incorporate relevant functions (to cope) such as prompt reply to customer enquiries, real- time provision of subscriber services along with real-time and interactive billing.