[June 15, 1999]

XACCT, ASC Billing Solutions Partner To Provide Converged Telecom And Internet Billing

XACCT Technologies, Inc., a leader in the emerging IP mediation market, and ASC Billing Solutions, Inc. announced that they have entered into a partnership. Under the terms of the agreement, ASC will integrate the XACCTusage network usage metering and mediation solution with ASC's Sentori Billing and Customer Care System, which is sold to both telephony and Internet customers.

XACCTusage captures Internet transaction details, in real time, from a range of network elements and application servers. It then performs policy-based filtering, aggregation, and merging to produce 'pre-billing' records that are sent to the Sentori system, which uses them to generate bills. The integration of XACCTusage and the Sentori products will enable Internet Services Providers (e.g., Internet Access and Voice Over Internet) to enjoy the benefits of the scalable Sentori system. In addition, the integrated solution allows Sentori telephony clients that also provide Internet Access to bill customers in a single statement.

"Our Sentori system, in conjunction with the XACCTusage product, now provides Internet Service Providers and Voice Over Internet Providers with an easy to use, affordable solution to their Billing and Customer Care needs, " said John Vu, ASC Billing Solutions vice president of sales and marketing. "It also opens our current and future client base to XACCT Technologies for their future new product introductions."

"By integrating its system with XACCTusage, ASC dramatically expands the applications for their Sentori engine," said Anil Uberoi, vice president of marketing, XACCT Technologies. "Together, XACCT and ASC provide an affordable convergent Billing and Customer Care solution for IPs and Telecoms alike."

XACCTusage is the first product that enables service providers to capture comprehensive and accurate billing records from the IP infrastructure and use them to create simple 'phone bills' for their services. Its multi-source, multi-layer architecture enables XACCTusage to extract billable information from multiple network devices and from all layers of the network - from the physical layer to the application layer - in real time. XACCTusage software distills and enhances this data to produce accurate, meaningful billing records called XDRs, or XACCT Detail Records, similar to the Call Detail Records (CDRs) generated by telco switches. XACCTusage also mediates between the existing Customer Care and Billing (CCB) system and the IP infrastructure, allowing automated service provisioning for service activation, authentication, and authorization.

The ASC Sentori Billing and Customer Care System is an innovative, cost-effective, client/server and web-based technology application that provides billing and customer care solutions. The Sentori product provides consolidated turnkey solutions for convergent billing for wireless, wire line, satellite, cable, Internet, paging, and private network services. The system offers client/server and Web enriched features including multi-lingual, multi-currency, flexible tax structures, and service bureau over the Internet, to support carriers worldwide. It enables quick deployment of new services and marketing promotions while providing system scalability, reliability, and flexibility.

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