Support Systems: News Briefs

Corporate Accountability

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act was a hot topic at Billing World this summer. The law, signed by President Bush in July 2002, aims to stem conflicts of interest and hold companies more responsible for their accounting practices. Several vendors talked about how their billing solutions can track revenue, supply chain partner exchanges and the like which enables service providers to get a better handle on their accounts. Connexn Technologies President and CEO Charles Crenshaw says revenue assurance products like those offered by his company are more important to companies than ever in light of Sarbanes-Oxley. “Data integrity is a key to financial integrity,” he says. Crenshaw says Sarbanes-Oxley is in the spotlight now because companies are trying to figure out what they need to do to comply with the relatively new law, before CEOs sign on the line. MetraTech’s CTO Jim Culbert says his company’s tools allow people to check supply chain records to see who used what, when and how. “People are more concerned about the auditability of business processes,” says Culbert. “That is first and foremost in managers’ minds as it relates to IT systems.” Culbert says XBRL is a business reporting language that standardizes the vocabulary of business reporting (like sales vs. revenue, etc.). The success of such an effort to standardize language about finances is “virtually guaranteed to happen,” Culbert says.

Data Integrity

Connexn Technologies, a data integrity and billing vendor to Tier 1 service providers, has won business from eight new customers, including Broadwing and KPN. Connexn also is extending its usage and rating modules, which look at usage records (like CDR, IPDR) and audits from source to customer to ensure the integrity of the data. The system, for example, checks records to ensure all data fields have appropriate data, as well as checking the information against the service providers’ business rules and seeing if the appropriate volume of traffic is running over various trunk groups.

Telco Solution

CSG Systems has launched a new North American service bureau for data mediation and billing, provisioning, plant management and inventory management. Rural telco Fairpoint Communications Inc. of North Carolina is the first customer. CSG already runs bureaus, but the others have focused on cable company requirements, whereas the new one was designed for wireless and wireline telcos.

Better Balance

At Billing World, Amdocs highlighted its recently released Enabler 5.0 solution, which has more support for content and commerce and online charging. New features mean the user can, for instance, check the cost of a download before downloading it. “These types of balance management [features] increase the comfort level,” says Rebecca Prudhomme, corporate marketing manager. Enabler supports voice, data, wireline, wireless, content and commerce applications. Version 5.0 of the product has outof- the-box integration with ClarifyCRM 12, the company’s latest version of its CRM software. The company’s new partnership relationship management release, Amdocs PRM 5, includes new self-care capabilities (such as drill down access to mid-cycle billing details), better scalability and performance, more rapid implementation, and flexible agreement management and settlement rules. In other news, the company announced that Nextel has replaced 11 databases and 14 billing systems with the Amdocs platform.

New Deal

Daleen Technologies Inc. has won a $10.5 million contract from Empresa de Telecomunicaciones de Bogota (ETB), a leading Colombian service provider, which will use the vendor’s RevChain billing and customer care products as part of a 29- month license and services agreement. The project, which was scheduled to begin last quarter, is expected to provide more than $7.6 million in new revenue to Daleen. The vendor also sells its Simpliciti.net event management solution and BillingCentral outsourced OSS operation. Earlier this summer at Billing World, Daleen debuted its Asuriti for event management and revenue assurance product.

Flying High with UDP

UDP’s outsourced COMET solution for customer care and order management now is available, the company announced at Billing World. The product offers a Web-based GUI and other new ease-ofuse features for the CSR. An automated switch interface called Asteroid sends CSR input directly to the switch without manual intervention. Also included is a plant management tool. COMET supports voice, Internet, cable and wireless services. The next release of COMET will support more robust Internet billing, with a later release supporting convergent billing. UDP traditionally has had the heaviest customer concentration in the rural ILEC market.

HP: One for All

Hewlett-Packard Co. is launching its CMC (Content Mediation and Charging) product. CMC is a standardized product intended to support multiple carrier services.

Money Management

Telution Inc.’s new COMX Collections Management Suite now includes the COMX Collections Decision Manager and the COMX Payment Arrangement Tool. Both are designed to help providers monitor customer behavior in real-time to allow for better customer credit decisions. For example, the tools enable a carrier to create new payment schedules based on particular customer profiles. “This is a significant new push for us in telecom, utilities and cable,” says John Konczal, vice president of product marketing.

Playing Cards

Personix is moving from a 30-millimeter PVC card technology to digital press cards to reduce the cost of calling cards for service providers, says Susan Reed, director of sales. The new cards will do away with magnetic strips and the thinner cards also may lower mailing costs, says Reed. “We’ve signed up several customers to go to the new format,” she says.

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