PLM Domain Overview

Contents

Overview

The MarketONE Partner Lifecycle Management (PLM) domain is a multi-tenant SaaS platform that is built on AWS. It is an application that an over-the-top (OTT) provider can use to integrate with a communication service provider (CSP). The PLM domain makes this integration possible by routing transactions to a BSS application that abstracts away the dependency from the OTTs. The PLM domain is also responsible for keeping the integration with the OTT valid: if the integration changes, the PLM domain maintains the integration without impacting the BSS. In turn, the PLM domain provides CSPs with the ability to create contracts and agreements, to perform service provisioning, to execute payment integration, and to create and manage settlements.

Contracts and Agreements

The PLM domain helps manage agreements and contracts with new OTTs. For example, part of the agreement with a new OTT could be about revenue sharing. For every transaction that a purchase is made for a digital service, the customer is charged ten dollars. Eighty percent of that charge gets paid to the OTT, and twenty percent of that change is paid to the CSP. This revenue share splitting of 80/20 is done by the PLM domain. In turn, part of the contract with a new OTT could be about a fixed price agreement. This means that for every transaction that is coming in for a user, the operator is paid nine dollars. What the PLM domain does for contracts is that it manages the settlements for them.

Service Provisioning

The PLM domain helps manage service provisioning flows. Consider the following example. A user purchases a streaming service. If the user purchases this streaming service from a service provider, the PLM domain takes that particular user request and potentially sends the user information to the Eros streaming service. At this point Eros may either create the user with the same user credentials, or it may send an email to the user based on these user credentials. This email could welcome the user to the Eros streaming service family, inform them that Eros knows they bought the service from the service provider, and instruct them to click a button in the body of the email to create their username and password. The actual service provisioning flow here in this example is a central part of the PLM domain functionality. In order to make this work the OTT needs to expose a provisioning API.

Payment Integration

The PLM domain helps manage the integration of payments. Consider the following example. At the end of the month you tally up all of the transactions that have come in. These transactions are split into the Netflix component and the service provider component, or the Netflix component and the company component. The payout to Netflix will be created into a report in the PLM domain and will be sent to the financial application. They can then do the actual transaction and make the payment to the OTT.

Settlements

The PLM domain helps manage settlements and settlement rules between CSPs and OTTs. The PLM settlement engine processes these settlements based on OTT billing periods. They are calculated based on the settlement rules that are defined using the PLM partner relationship management (PRM) functionality. See the PLM Domain Functional Overview section for more information.

Integration APIs

When it comes to companies like Netflix, the only system they need to communicate with is MarketONE's PLM domain. In the process of communicating with a company like Netflix, the PLM domain internally routes requests directly to the operator backend, and then sends them to the ULM domain for orchestration. This means that a digital service provider like Netflix does not need to talk to the billing system directly. The advantage here is that since the PLM domain has built integrations to major OTTs, these can be used by CSPs with zero integration work required on their end.

To accomplish this MarketONE has a set of public APIs that are used. This set of integration APIs are used by OTTs to onboard onto the platform. The PLM domain then integrates this into the backend system (either directly if customers only use MarketONE's PLM domain, or indirectly through the ULM domain into the backend systems). These predefined APIs are documented in the REST API Guides section. If OTTs want to be part of the MarketONE ecosystem, then these APIs will be used to integrate into their backend systems. In most cases these APIs are mandated.

Revision History

Version Description
2019.08 Initial release.
2019.12 Added Contents and Revision History sections.
2020.02 Updated the diagram in the Overview section, and added the Integration APIs section.