As always new Hydra is even faster and more stable than before, and, most importantly, has a handful of new features.
The most important new feature of Hydra 5 is Dealers. A large number of providers are working with partners. Hydra 5 provides you with convenient tools for that.
We added a new subject type — Dealer. Enter your partners as dealers into Hydra and set up commissions.
Hydra supports two types of commissions: on payments and on sales.
In some places customers are not yet familiar with online payments. Large providers often partner up with agents and local small businesses to simplify the payment process for their customers. Partners, in turn, receive commission for the funds collected. To set up such a scheme in Hydra specify the commission on payments.
Depending on the business requirements specify the commissions as a percentage or as a fixed amount the partner shall receive for each payment collected.
If you work with small local providers you might find commissions on sales useful. In this case the Dealer tends to your customers’ needs and maintains the “last mile” infrastructure. Hydra calculates the commissions based on the charges against customers’ accounts.
Hydra allows you to specify different commissions for different services. Thus a partner may receive 100 % of what the customer paid for tech support, but only 15 % of the Internet access monthly charge.
Stay tuned! We realize that working with dealers is an important side of a provider’s business so we will continue to work on this feature in next releases.
In this release we added a new instrument for integrating third-party services with Hydra — Business Hooks. Often our clients already have their own IT infrastructure, and not every part of it is conveniently controlled by the billing system.
Integrate your software with Hydra via asynchronous message queues. Hydra will notify your applications of important business events happening to customers. You decide how to process these messages and which actions to take. Next steps are limited only by the capabilities of your infrastructure and skills of your developers.
Hydra generates messages for all events that have an effect on account balances: payments, credit limits, and charges. The messages have different types so that the recipient could filter out the ones that need not be processed.
Business hooks can be used, for instance, to integrate with a third-party bonus system, to initiate business processes in Hydra OMS, or to replicate data to other components of your OSS/BSS.
We plan on further expanding the business hooks in next releases.
We carefully watch the newest tech and strive to provide you with its advantages.
Components of Hydra are now deployed using Docker images. It makes setting up Hydra easier and faster when launching or replacing a server which means saving your time and hours of technical support.
Moreover, using Docker containers minimizes the cost of maintaining different versions of the same application on one server which is useful for testing or load balancing.
Give your customers an option to switch to a new price plan without having to wait for the billing period to end. Hydra will immediately close the current billing period and start a new one with a new plan.
Choose the preferred behaviour when configuring the Self-Сare Portal.
This release also supports a new special rating method to use in your service schemes — “Prevailing traffic only”.
With this rating method Hydra does not charge traffic to the customer account as long as the billing period is still on. At the end of the billing period Hydra will choose the “prevailing” direction — the one that has the most traffic — and rate and charge only traffic bound in this direction.
In this release we expanded our permissions system so that you could even more granularly set up your employees access to important data.
For example, to edit provisioning configuration templates an operator now needs a special privilege. During the upgrade Hydra will grant this privilege automatically to all operators who already have profile templates and session types editing privileges.
We also added new privileges for working with Hydra OMS.
With every new release we integrate Hydra with more and more third-party services. Starting with this release Hydra supports payment systems PSCB and Yandex.Kassa, and IPTV-middleware Stalker.
We also expanded our Hydra OMS integration. If you use Hydra together with Hydra OMS, user accounts of your employees will now be synchronized. To make managing your employee accounts easier Hydra allows specifying the Hydra OMS access levels on the Permissions tab.
We constantly improve the language localization of our products. In this release we revised the localization of quick search and the registry of regions.
Hydra supports almost a hundred of different currencies, but we realize that the vast majority of providers rarely need more than one. To make the lives of your operators easier limit the the list of available currencies in the configuration of Service Provider Console. This will make working with price specifications faster and will decrease the number of mistakes.
We take safety of your data seriously, and in this release we improved the built-in audit.
Check out the new audit on the customer page — it now includes changes made on the General tab. We also added audit features to the active equipment page — take advantage of them if you suspect an operator made a mistake which led to an outage. And the new audit for discount certificates will help resolving a conflict with a customer over discounts.
The audit now also has access to the archived data.
The early termination form now has a detailed breakdown of what the early termination fee consists of and how it was calculated.
Also it is now much easier to tell subscriptions to the contract plans on the customer page.
In the previous release Hydra received the automatic funds allocation. In this release we added more information about it so that you could easily inspect the edge cases.
Check the details of payment matching on payments and charge logs pages. For payments Hydra shows the list of receivables paid off by this payment. Conversely, on the charge log page there is a list of payments used to pay off the receivables from this charge log.
We constantly update and expand our API to provide you with an easy and convenient way to integrate your own services with Hydra.
In this release we added SS_AUTHENTICATION_PKG, a new package, to the API. It is a set of procedures for authenticating users in third-party applications using Hydra. In recent releases we ourselves use it to authenticate components of Hydra. We recommend using this new package instead of outdated calls.
Also the API now includes the SS_FILES_PKG package for working with files in Hydra.
We constantly work on performance of Hydra. In this release we sped up the CDR loading, computation of several Provisioning substitutes, and working with traffic classes specifications. Also audit on documents in the Service Provider Console is now much faster.
We also improved the “Analyzing database schema” scheduled task. Now the built-in query optimiser always has access to the most up-to-date statistics.
