Overview
TIBCO® Offer and Price Engine (TIBCO OPE) is a cloud-native, in-memory omnichannel server that answers requests from a digital service provider's customer-facing channels for commercial offers and prices, while using business rules such as customer eligibility and product compatibility.
Why is TIBCO OPE important? It offers:
- high-velocity offering,
- agility to launch new offers,
- independence from any CRM system,
- data privacy compliance,
- fast response with in-memory architecture,
- high scalability that lets you easily deploy new nodes as demand increases, and
- independent API that are native to TIBCO's commercial catalog and order management.
TIBCO OPE is used extensively by digital services provides, such as telecomm and media companies. Within those companies, TIBCO OPE is used by the Business Support Systems (BSS) and Operational Support Systems (OSS) departments to model products in the TIBCO Product and Service Catalog, as well as design eligibility and compatibility rules to present the appropriate products to customers.
TIBCO OPE is one of the four products that comprise the TIBCO Fulfillment Orchestration Suite:
TIBCO Product and Service Catalog
The TIBCO Product and Service Catalog includes the Offer and Price Designer, which is a web GUI application used to model products. There are two types of products defined in the catalog:
- Customer-facing products - These types of products are called offers. Offers have prices attached to them. These are the products that customers can order through one of the available channels: via a call center, browser / web site, smart phone, or automatically generated Value Added Services (auto-VAS).
- Resource-facing products - These are products that are modeled for network services, which are not applicable in the context of TIBCO OPE.
The customer-facing product models in the catalog can be designed as single offers, for example, a smart phone, or DSL. They can also be modeled as bundled offers, for example, a package of products and services, such as a landline, DSL, and a smart phone. The catalog can help model a hierarchy of products from the customer-facing offers all the way to the resource-facing services.
The customer-facing products are offered to customers, via TIBCO OPE, based on eligibility and compatibility rules, and possibly specified search criteria.
For more information, see Key Concepts of TIBCO Offer and Price Engine.
TIBCO Offer and Price Engine
The TIBCO Offer and Price Engine is used to present offers, that is, products that have been modeled in the TIBCO Product and Service Catalog, to customers, based on eligibility and compatibility rules, and possibly specified search criteria.
TIBCO OPE provides REST APIs that can be used to get offers, and validate orders. These REST APIs are based on the open APIs published by the TM Forum consortium so that the TIBCO OPE APIs can be implemented in a consistent and predictable way.
For more information, see Key Concepts of TIBCO Offer and Price Engine.
TIBCO Order Management
After products and services are presented to customers, and they make selections and submit an order, the order goes into TIBCO Order Management for processing. TIBCO Order Management uses product models as defined previously in the TIBCO Product and Service Catalog to orchestrate the services that are needed to completely fulfill the order. These can include services such as scheduling installation, activating the service, begin billing for the service, and so on.
TIBCO Product and Service Inventory
After an order has been fulfilled, products that have been sold and services that have been activated are recorded in TIBCO Product and Service Inventory. This information is used for future interactions with the customer, for example, to feed compatibility and eligibility rules.