Roundup

Billing Solutions

By Paula Bernier, Executive Editor, TMC  |  June 08, 2015

Traditionally, billing has been considered a back office function that was a cost center, and not a particularly dynamic one. Our new on-demand society is changing all that – and creating a requirement for much more agile billing solutions.

Indeed, companies are looking for more flexible billing solutions because they want to get their new services up and running quickly, but the dynamic nature of our on-demand society means that organizations are not always sure upfront what their product catalogs will look like or what prices and packaging will work best in the marketplace, says Tom Dibble, president and CEO of Aria (News - Alert) Systems.

LogiSense Corp CEO Flavio Gomes agrees.

“It is an exciting time in our industry as we’re experiencing a fundamental shift in how goods and services are being delivered over the net,” says Gomes. “How CSPs choose to monetize those transactions will determine who succeeds…. Having a usage rating and billing platform flexible enough to allow for experimentation with different pricing plans, tiered bundling, subscription rates and pooling will be critical if CSPs are to offer truly custom service plans for the end user.”

Amdocs

Amdocs is the world leader in revenue management and convergent billing systems for the telecommunications industry. Amdocs Charging and Billing suite of products answers the need for modernization, convergence, and real-time services offerings across multiple lines of business and customer segments. Amdocs Charging and Billing provides pre-integrated products such as Amdocs Billing, Amdocs Accounts Receivable, and Amdocs Collections to cover all revenue management operations. Furthermore, Amdocs offers the Omni-Channel Billing Experience solution to help service providers maximize the value of their most frequent and consistent communication channel – the bill – and drive higher adoption of paperless billing. The Omni-Channel Billing Experience is a unified bill data aggregation, bill generation, and presentation solution with flexible design capabilities and multi-channel distribution of bills to print, PDF, interactive email, and online channels. The solution ensures that bills viewed by customers across these channels are always consistent, and gives agents the same view of the bill as the customer – enhancing customer service and the customer experience. As the market leader in software and services for communications service providers, Amdocs brings more than 30 years of experience to our Omni-Channel Billing Experience solution, ensuring service providers' success and embracing their biggest challenges. 

Aria Systems

Aria Systems helps companies create and manage monetization opportunities to grow their enterprise-class recurring revenue businesses. With Aria, brands such as Hootsuite, Pitney Bowes, Telekom Denmark, Constant Contact, and RingCentral have expanded their revenue operations beyond basic billing capabilities to better monetize their products and services. Their sophisticated billing models produce predictable revenue, happy customers, and less need for IT assistance. Aria’s Active Monetization Platform gets companies to market faster with a wider variety of products and services, while maximizing customer satisfaction, retention, and lifetime value. The cloud-based platform manages three components of monetization: offerings, accounts, and revenue moments. The product catalog allows offerings to be provisioned at specified prices and timeframes, with revenue easily recognized in accordance with currencies, geographies, and business units. The platform also integrates with CRM systems to manage all of the customer account information needed for proper assignment and recognition of revenues. Quick configuration of plans allows for rapid testing and development of new packages and bundles. Lastly, clients can take advantage of each of their customer-driven events –or revenue moments − with triggered, automated engagement to maximize cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. Aria is headquartered in San Francisco, with field offices throughout the world.

Cass Information Systems

Cass Telecom, a division of Cass Information Systems, provides global enterprises with telecom expense management, mobility management, and BYOD expense management services to help those businesses control and reduce costs, gain better visibility into their key communications processes, and better manage and secure their mobile workforce. As a member of the Federal Reserve, Cass offers global financial exchange and payment outsourcing capabilities, combined with detailed analytics and audit services to reduce costs and improve client efficiency. Cass is the only TEM provider that can receive funding and issue payments in local currencies around the world, helping clients avoid unnecessary VAT. Cass clients enjoy record-low late fees of only 0.01 percent of their spend and are able to eliminate disconnects due to non-payment entirely. Additionally, in 2014, Cass was awarded a patent for its Direct2Carrier Payments Solution, a process that enables faster adoption of BYOD programs while reducing the costs of paying stipends and reimbursements by making payments directly to employees’ carrier accounts. Clients using this process are able to eliminate any need for expense reports or payroll stipends, resulting in increased employee satisfaction with their BYOD program while maintaining visibility and control of enterprise mobile expenses.

Comverse

Comverse is a global provider of carrier-grade cloud-based and in-network monetization solutions that help global carriers and growing enterprises profitably enable the evolving ways people obtain and share digital experiences. The company's billing portfolio is augmented with expert managed services and tightly integrated policy management. Comverse delivers converged customer and revenue management solutions with a modular approach that provides a full end-to-end platform for customer care, order management, and revenue management, or a range of partial deployment options that best suit capex/opex, operational, and marketing needs. Comverse's new Monetization Cloud solution is the a cloud-based integrated customer, order and revenue management suite that allows enterprises of all sizes, along with service providers, to find agility and efficiency through the cloud. Comverse serves more than 450 customers with its reliable, scalable, and advanced revenue management and billing solutions.

Dialexia

Dialexia is a Canadian telecommunications software and service provider that specializes in the development of VoIP business solutions for corporations, SMEs, carriers, solution providers, and resellers. Dialexia’s standalone billing solution – designed to serve various types of phone service providers – is embedded directly into its flagship PBX (News - Alert) platforms, Dial-Gate Softswitch and HERO Hosted PBX. The billing solution is a web-administered server that provides authentication, authorization, and accounting services to clients that process prepaid and postpaid transactions. It is capable of managing a wide range of billing account types for agents, resellers and broadband customers, and includes an intuitive, user-friendly web interface aimed at simplifying account administration and management. Dialexia's billing solution also features embedded CDR services to provide clients with full-featured management, advanced reporting and real-time call monitoring capabilities, as well as a special call routing component that enables service providers to partner with one another to exchange call termination.

Ericsson

Ericsson’s billing and revenue management portfolio comprises billing, charging and policy, application server-based charging and policy, mediation and application servers. Most recently, Ericsson has touted its Ericsson Billing as a Service, an end-to-end BSS for postpaid customer care, charging, and billing that is powered by the company’s fully-featured Ericsson BSCS iX billing system and hosted in Ericsson data centers. Ericsson Billing as a Service is unique in its ability to deliver benefits across customer care, partner management, and billing, finance and debt management. This value is made possible by key features such as preconfigured plans, value packs, and multiple billing modes. The result is increased operational efficiency, faster time to market, and streamlined costs. Spanning all business-to-consumer and business-to-business money streams, Ericsson’s comprehensive billing and revenue management solutions can help operators capture and secure money streams and take advantage of business opportunities that span data, multimedia, and traditional voice and messaging services. As a converged platform, Ericsson gives operators the tools to handle all users and services, regardless of payment option or access method. It is also pre-integrated with other Ericsson solutions such as self-care, analytics, OSS and core, and supports available standards for multivendor integration.

Freeside Internet Services Inc.

The Freeside billing platform is the premier open source billing, trouble Ticketing, and provisioning software for ISPs, VoIP providers, and other online businesses. Like Linux or Android, the platform is available under a royalty-free license and supported by a global community of developers from multiple companies. Since 1996, thousands of companies have used the software to bill millions of customers. The platform includes billing and converged invoicing for Internet, VoIP and telco services, including anniversary/pro-rating, usage-based billing, CDR rating, free minutes, caps, toll-free billing, minute pools, 1/6/30/60 second billing, 30/6 and other split-billing, as well as real time credit card and electronic check processing. The CRM module includes prospecting, quotations, and customer conversions. An extensive trouble ticketing system assists in support operations, and the customer portal allows customer self-care functionality such as signing up, changing plans, making payments, viewing usage, and more. The software supports retail and wholesale operation, and multiple companies or brands in a multi-tenant capacity. Freeside Internet Services offers turnkey billing appliances, implementation and training services, and customized billing solutions.

Sandy Beaches Software

Since 1989 Sandy Beaches Software (News - Alert) has provided accurate, affordable, billing software to the competitive telecommunications industry. InTELEbill combines accuracy with affordability to meet customer service, provisioning, and billing needs for VoIP providers. What sets this seasoned billing company apart from others? The people that help the customers grow and remain profitable. SBS developers utilize customer suggestions to create programming enhancements that improve clients’ operational efficiencies. Free upgrades are released on a regular basis. The operations staff contributes to clients’ profitability by knowing their customer’s data. Team members review numbers during each billing run looking for discrepancies. The company takes a proactive approach to reviewing reports during a billing cycle; if something looks out of place, it will point it out and offer suggestions to correct the problem, and give the customer time to make the necessary corrections. If it’s causing revenue leakage, and the customer’s billing staff isn’t willing to correct it, Sandy Beaches will make upper management aware of the situation. Start-ups and established providers benefit from low minimums, free conversions, and a partner with combined telecommunications industry experience totaling 121 years.

LogiSense Corp.

To win in today’s ever evolving connected world, machine-to-machine, telecommunications, unified communications, and enterprise service providers rely on LogiSense to remain ahead of the marketplace with disruptive service offerings and enhanced operational efficiencies. LogiSense’s licensed and software-as-a-service solutions are built on its award-winning, real-time usage rating and billing platform, EngageIP. LogiSense understands the critical role accurate, real-time usage rating plays in the modern service provider’s ability to monetize offerings, maximize revenue, and control costs in the usage economy. The dynamic convergence of subscription- and usage-based billing models allow service providers to monetize in real time any triggered event in the connected world to gain significant competitive advantages. EngageIP enables the usage economy by providing seamless and open access rating, charging, billing, and mediation capabilities for any service, any medium, and any provider of real-time network services. LogiSense solutions allow customers to evolve business operations and end user offerings with the flexibility and scalability required to address the service, billing, and back-office realities of today’s rapidly-evolving marketplace.

OSG Billing Services

OSG Billing Services (News - Alert) is a provider of outsourced billing and statement services and customer communication management with more than 20 years of experience as a next-generation business technology partner providing integrated multi-channel print and electronic solutions through a state-of-the-art processing environment. OSG offers comprehensive and flexible solutions including electronic billing and statement services, document printing and mailing, and a suite of forward-thinking marketing campaigns. Progressive communication technologies enable OSG's clients to transform their customer interactions to drive revenue, reduce costs, and strengthen relationships. OSG ePayment offers our customers and members the flexibility they require for both presentment and payment of bills, invoices, and statements. It has built up a suite of solutions based upon customers' and members' preferences. OSG ePayment provides automated self-service capabilities and the ability to have instant answers to customers’ billing questions. OSG ePayment includes web-based screens that allow clients’ customers and CSRs to view PDF images of all bills and invoices and see payment history. OSG offers customers a multi-channel payment platform that can be easily integrated into organizations’ own internal billing applications. OSG’s goal is to make the payment process as easy and convenient as possible by offering the payment options end customers expect and require.

Profitec Billing Services Inc.

Profitec is a SaaS billing provider combining state of the art billing with powerful OSS components, which serve a wide range of functionality. The OmniBill service integrates with platform or carrier usage data to support a wide range of billing methodologies including full taxation support. OmniBill supports integrated invoicing for dozens of separate telecom and non-telecom products and includes product bundling, in addition to multi-product and cross-product discounting. OmniBill easily provides support for subscription billing as well as usage-sensitive offerings. Other system functions include CRM, channel management with full commissioning, e-billing presentment, end user self-care, and end user self-initiation. Profitec’s open APIs simplify integration to many third-party applications for integration with sales systems and accounting applications. The core OmniBill OSS is enhanced with the integration of Profitec’s OmniAgent sales channel management and OmniSignup end user e-commerce applications. The newest OmniBill release offers complete support for hosted communications including multiple billing options and support for end user-based product bundles. As a service bureau, it provides the service on a pay-as-you-go basis, minimizing startup expenses and capital equipment investment.

SAP

SAP BRIM, part of the company’s broader Customer Engagement and Commerce portfolio, is a complete solution that addresses the consumer-to-cash business process. The offering monetizes transactions and streamlines the billing process for organizations, enabling customers to transition from a product sales model to one based off of connected service sales. The solution consists of business model design and pricing simulation, subscription order management, usage metering and transaction pricing, billing receivables and collections, and partner revenue share. BRIM captures granular transactions, running them parallel to the company’s marketing solution, therefore enabling the company to draw customer insights and tailor it business strategy accordingly.

SAS

Through big data analytics, SAS (News - Alert) helps CSPs quickly identify situations leading to revenue leakage and the correlated root cause, whether due to billing and collections, network or fraud issues. As business models becomes more complex in the digital economy, it creates increasing possibility of revenue leakage – the unintended (positive or negative) variances in collecting revenue from customers. With so many customers, products, offers, and channels for CSPs to manage, those opportunities are everywhere. The SAS big data analytics toolkit includes: SAS Enterprise Miner, SAS Visual Analytics and Visual Statistics and SAS Interface to Hadoop, which enable CSPs to automate the process of sifting through myriad systems, promotions, and pricing plans to identify gaps in the application of business rules. These products provide the ability to conduct analytics on an enterprise hub that brings data from not only the billing systems but also the OSS and conduct advanced analytics and data mining on the data. CSPs can execute numerous sophisticated promotions and pricing plans with confidence that their invoices accurately reflect the pricing for the services provided.

Telinta

Telinta’s TeliCore solution is cloud based, and unlike stand-alone solutions, Telinta fully integrates billing with other key parts of a customer’s business such as switching and customer management, and it does all this in real time. TeliCore is Telinta's cloud-based carrier-grade switching and billing platform, enabling VoIP service providers around the globe to benefit from cost-effective billing, fully integrated with switching and customer management. It is a hosted white-label platform, enabling customers to build a profitable VoIP business, without owning their own infrastructure. TeliCore provides real-time call detail records for both prepaid and postpaid services. Customers can perform on-the-spot analysis of key metrics. TeliCore also includes self-care portals for end users to review their account, make payments, recharge prepaid balances, and more. TeliCore also supports bilateral billing agreements and offers multiple-currency billing, with auto-fetch for current exchange rates. TeliCore enables VoIP service providers to directly bill their end users and resellers, creating volume discounts and promotions. TeliCore's highly-flexible design enables payments via Paypal, credit cards, in-person cash payments, and more. TeliCore enables access to third-party billing compliance services for telecom taxation in more than 100 countries. Founded in 2002, Telinta offers a full portfolio of white-label solutions including wholesale VoIP, hosted PBX, call centers, audio-conferencing, business and residential VoIP, calling card, mobile, callback and other VoIP services.  

TransNexus

The TransNexus NexOSS solution is a pre-paid and post-paid billing solution for SIP trunking services. It is available for enterprises and service providers and is fully integrated with dynamic least cost routing and telecom fraud prevention and detection features. Call detail record mediation automatically reformats CDRs for export to any external billing system. NexOSS also features credit controls that permit users to set customized email and SNMP alarm triggers based on hourly or daily spend rates per customer. This feature allows a service provider or enterprise to receive real-time alerts and block or divert calls when customers are experiencing unusual or fraudulent activity, preventing future billing disputes. Other valuable features of NexOSS include multi-currency settlement billing and extensive reporting providing detailed call traffic and quality of service reports. NexOSS is optimized for and maintains interoperability partnerships with strategic vendors including Oracle Acme Packet, BroadSoft, Metaswitch, and Taqua. 




Edited by Dominick Sorrentino