On October 1, Telarix (News - Alert) rolled out a new usage fee for a select group of carrier partners on its iXLink platform. Altogether, 600 out of 4,000 carriers were affected.

Now, customers have to pay a monthly platform fee of $125 for carriers offering up to 5 links, or $250 for carriers with more than 5 links.

Telarix maintains that this is a nominal fee for carriers to use iXLink. Their reason for the new pricing model is to “defray support costs that have grown over time, meet the increasing demand, and raise the standard of support.”

Not all customers, however, are on board with this announcement. Many carriers want out, and are now looking for alternative solutions.

One option to consider is Orca Wave’s (News - Alert) Automated Price Analysis platform. 

The Orca Wave Automated Price Analysis platform offers an efficient and accurate automated platform to load carrier prices.  This system does not compromise partner ecosystems, or burden strategic partners with unexpected charges. 

Orca Wave’s platform provides an intelligent data parser that quickly scans each partner’s price and code sheet and normalizes the data into a workable format for your routing engine.  .

This intelligent data parser by Orca Wave offers the following features:

Automation: Are you buried in a deluge of daily partner price sheets, that are each unique, contain a wheelbarrow of data changes – new codes, moved codes, new destination names, duplicate information, price errors, missing information, price increases and price decreases? Also, are you faced with how to get this information into your routing tables? 

Orca Wave…

• Finds and blocks all errors, missing information, duplicates and other data problems;
• Ferrets out all new destination codes for international voice and SMS services for possible inclusion in the routing tables and makes sure the LERG table is mapped correctly for US domestic voice prices;
• Highlights all price increases with both margin and amount of price changes;
• Highlights all price decreases on a destination by destination basis, and;
• Makes sure the partner is meeting their contractual notice period.

Orca Wave’s process – including the conversion into usable data format for routing tables – operates without any employee involvement. Partner emails and FTP price and code sheets are automatically detected, uploaded, reviewed, parsed and forwarded to your routing tables just minutes after the new price sheet arrives. And customers also benefit from an analysis and daily summary of which partner prices were loaded.

Orca Wave’s library of more than 4,000 partner price and code sheets is a huge data format repository to be leveraged for the automation of partner price delivery, analysis and data parsing of each individual partner price change.

Proactive Pricing: Instead of waiting for pricing gems from partners, Orca Wave lets you be proactive and generate Target (News - Alert) Rates that are securely delivered over a special carrier portal or email. These rates let you detail prices by destination with appropriate MOUs and ASR criteria.

Orca Wave, in other words, makes partners work to win your business. Orca Wave’s Target Rate file allows customers to quickly name a price goal, without disclosing the current provider. 

Dispute with confidence: More and more carrier invoices are proving to be incorrect.  We are seeing partners that are overbilling 5 to 10 percent. Orca Wave can help save customers thousands of dollars through dispute reviews.

What’s more, for international traffic there are differences in naming conventions, currency conversions and time zones to navigate — as well as price changes, MOU rounding and call counts. So there are a lot of moving parts that can make up the source of a dispute. 

Orca Wave eliminates all of those comparison issues by converting customer reports to specific partner information layouts. AP teams love this feature, as they can quickly gauge if the partner invoice warrants an initial dispute step which our exportable file covers completely.  If there is still a problem, then CDR by CDR mapping is part of our DNA at Orca Wave.  We process over 6 billion CDRs per month and we audit ID, rate and price each individual CDR for our customers, as we know these are the gold bricks of our customer’s business.

For US domestic disputes, the jurisdictional price assignments are often incorrect by our customers’ partners and we get to the heart of the differences very quickly and factually.

Orca Wave offers two tiers of service to manage prices from carrier partners.

Tier One lets users:

• Autoload SMS and Voice partner prices and codes with analysis at code level including identifying partner sheet errors (duplicates, missing codes, etc.) as well as price changes;
• DB repository all partner prices and codes and summarize daily reports of suppliers loaded;
• Review all loaded partner prices by carrier and by destination, and;
• Reformat and normalize data to meet your needs.

Tier Two includes all of the Tier One features plus the following:

• Partner bill validation;
• Partner management to assist with disputes;
• Target rate provisioning for partners;
• CDR mapping, and;
• Detailed reporting.

Orca Wave’s solutions are backed by a highly experienced support team that provide quick responses to customer’s questions and solve issues expeditiously.