When it comes to rolling out enterprise software, no one takes one for the team like the guys and gals in charge of delivery. They’re always on the front line, ready to battle any obstacle to get the system up and providing value to customers.
Up until now, rolling out a telco charging engine has been a huge, heavy lift for the delivery folks. But not anymore, because the public cloud-based Totogi Charging System is delivered in a completely different way. For this episode, I’m joined by Totogi’s global head of delivery, Damon Wheaton, to talk about:
Listen to our conversation by clicking play above or subscribe through your favorite podcast platform – see the links in the right column above.
Damon Wheaton has worked with telecoms for more than 25 years and witnessed the evolution of analogue networks to generations of digital networks. He has extensive experience working for telecom operators, software vendors, network equipment providers, and global consulting and professional service organizations. As the global head of delivery for Totogi, he is instrumental in rolling out Totogi’s cloud-based BSS platform, which empowers operators and breaks legacy software vendor lock-in. He was formerly Global VP for Professional Services at MATRIXX Software, Inc.
The Telco in 20 podcast won a 2022 Gold Hermes Award and was recognized on Forrester’s 2021 list of the Top 100 Channel Podcasts and Feedspot’s Top 10 Telecom Podcasts list.
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Traditional charging deployments are complex, expensive, and resource heavy. Operators must procure hardware, manage data center infrastructure, handle cross-border supply chains, build redundancy across multiple sites, and navigate thousands of price plans. Totogi’s global head of delivery, with 29 years of experience, notes that even the fastest traditional deployment he ever completed took four and a half months from contract signing to first charging transaction.
Totogi’s Charging as a Service is built natively on the public cloud, which eliminates the need for hardware procurement, data center setup, networking, and failover configuration. The platform runs as a true multi-tenant SaaS product—when a customer signs up, the infrastructure is already live. Totogi’s team can connect a live network to the charging engine in as little as one to three days after contract signing, compared to the months required by legacy vendors.
In one pilot implementation, Totogi’s delivery team started work at 8:30 AM on a Tuesday and had live calls processing through the charging engine within eight hours. Customers have reported being so surprised by the speed that they checked the call records to confirm the system was actually working. The target for full network connectivity is one to three days from contract signature.
Very few. A recent Totogi implementation required a team of just three people on Totogi’s side, each contributing roughly 20% of their time over about four weeks. The customer team was similarly lean—a product expert, occasional network security personnel, and network experts, collectively representing the equivalent of about two part-time people. This contrasts sharply with traditional deployments that require large, dedicated, on-site teams.
DR’s conviction about India stems from her earlier experience deploying a traditional charging system for an Indian operator with 250 million subscribers—a project requiring 12 physical sites across six locations plus six failover centers. With Totogi on the public cloud, that entire infrastructure burden disappears. India has some of the world’s largest subscriber bases and lowest ARPU, making Totogi’s transaction-based pricing and massive scalability—capable of handling one billion subscribers on a single instance—a compelling fit. Read more about India’s 5G spectrum auction and Reliance Group’s emergence as a big winner.
Unlike legacy charging systems that require custom implementations per customer, Totogi operates as a shared platform—similar to how Salesforce works versus how Siebel used to work. Every customer runs on the same codebase, which means continuous improvements and bug fixes are deployed automatically across all tenants. Operators can purchase Totogi on AWS Marketplace and be live within hours, with the platform ready to scale from a single subscriber to a billion without any infrastructure changes.
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