2001 Billing Excellence Awards

The first Billing Excellence awards ceremony kicked off Billing World 2001, which was held in June in Orlando, Fla. The awards recognized the industry’s leading companies, their products and the impact they have had on the telecommunications market.

Best Overall Product

Amdocs

Amdocs’ Ensemble product has been deployed at providers around the globe, including Bell Canada/Certen, BellSouth, Libertel, Mannesmann Mobilfunk, Nextel, Pacific Bell Wireless, Rogers AT&T, Sprint and Verizon. The company has provided its customer relationship management product to providers such as Digifone and Bell Canada’s Sympatico. Its partnership relationship functionality has been implemented at more than 10 Tier 1 and Tier 2 operators worldwide.
Amdocs supported more than 2 billion IP-Service Detail Records and more than 369 million customer detail records per hour in a recent benchmark test with HP.
A Chorleywood Consulting report on GPRS and 3G billing stated that one-third of the telcos that had announced their GPRS/3G billing supplier in October 2000 were planning to use Amdocs’ system. Its GPRS customers include BT Genie, Mobilkom and Vodafone.

Best New Company

Openet Telecom

With its debut in July 1999, Openet built a convergent mediation platform called FusionWorks to help providers manage data from their networks to bill for services.
AT&T Wireless Services employed Openet to help collect subscriber usage information for several network elements and services in the deployment of its new IP-based offerings.
Mark Loveland, head of European e-business research at JP Morgan, said, “Openet is establishing itself as a global leader of network usage and billing mediation solutions. Securing AT&T Wireless Services as its first U.S. customer demonstrates the confidence AT&T Wireless Services has in Openet’s technology and its ability to deliver.”
The company also won a contract with broadband data and corporate Internet services provider Esat Business, a division of the British Telecom subsidiary Esat Group.

Best New Product

Xacct Technologies

Xacct Technologies’ product, XACCTmobile, allows operators to capture raw network usage data from GPRS, UMTS, CDMA2000 and IP networks and transform them into the critical business information needed for service creation, billing, marketing, churn reduction, fraud prevention, service level verification, capacity planning and customer relationship management.
Major mobile providers on three continents have already deployed the system. British Telecom’s Manx subsidiary selected XACCTmobile to collate data on usage, content type and rate of transmission.
Mark Briers, BT’s director for the Manx UMTS project, noted that the company evaluated products from 18 different vendors before choosing Xacct. Xacct believes that companies around the world will keep their eye on the BT Manx deployment as a test-bed for future 3G networks.

Customer Success Story

Financial Statement Services Inc.

At Verizon Wireless, service bureau FSSI was tasked with consolidating the billing processes for 12 business units located across the United States—each with its own billing platform and reporting requirements. Together, these 12 business units produced more than 20 million bills per month.
FSSI reengineered the production process by designing and installing a circuit board for Xerox printers that would enable the company to continuously run variable-sized sheets. Ultimately, Xerox turned to FSSI for advice on how to make this circuitry available on its machines. To promote quality production, FSSI also promised employees a $150 reward for finding any production errors before they left the facility.
Today, FSSI prints and mails about 8 million bills for Verizon each month and archives the billing data to CD-ROM for use by Verizon’s call centers.

IP Billing

Portal Software

Portal’s Infranet is being used at more than 430 clients, including AOL Time Warner, Sprint, Exodus, France Telecom and China Mobile.
AOL is currently implementing Infranet to support services for its tens of millions of subscribers worldwide.
Portal’s implementation of Infranet at Liaoning Telecom led to an extended contract supporting the company’s subsidiary, Liaoning Public Multimedia Communication Network, which plans to expand its current capacity from 700,000 users to support more than 2.6 million users, thus becoming the largest provincial public information network in China. Other customers such as Telenor Mobile, Telewest, Qwest and JiTong have expanded their Infranet licenses over the past year to support additional services and subscribers.
PricewaterhouseCoopers is currently implementing Infranet at Vodafone UK to support GPRS services the company is launching this year.

Wireless Billing

Convergys Corporation

Convergys produces more than 1.3 million bills daily, touching about 41 percent of U.S. wireless subscribers. The company processes more than 50 billion wireless call detail records every year. It also processes more than 800 million roamer messages per month.
Convergys’ Atlys product is designed to support leading-edge mobile commerce services over third-generation wireless networks. Its benchmarks support 17 million subscribers with 10,000 usage events per second.
In May AT&T Wireless selected Convergys to support deployment of its third-generation wireless service, and British Telecom’s mobile Internet division, Genie, announced it will deploy the company’s product as well.
Convergys’ merger with Geneva Technology Limited in April has further solidified the company. Broadnet, a broadband solutions provider headquartered in Brussels, will include Geneva/Convergys in the rollout of its German network.

Systems Integrator

Cap Gemini Ernst & Young

Cap Gemini Ernst & Young has worked with more than 100 customers on billing and customer care projects.
Recently, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young was tasked by customer INTELSAT to implement a customer care and billing system for the satellite communications company’s broadband very small aperture terminal product. The company was charged with installing, customizing and integrating a billing system with INTELSAT’s existing legacy systems.
Cap Gemini Ernst & Young was responsible for developing custom interfaces, configuration and environment management; a custom interface to customer source system and legacy system; a custom Web interface for the entry of service registration and for the services in Infranet; and the generation of custom reports.

Billing Financial Software

Apogee Networks

In February British Telecommunications announced its plan to implement Apogee’s NetCountant Accountability on its intranet. The goal in using the product is to help BT define, monitor and rate data usage on its internal network delineated by departments, subsidiaries and partners. The tool will be used to manage bandwidth usage and improve network efficiency for the company’s 100,000 intranet users.
Darren Rowley of BT said, “Apogee Networks’ scalability and flexibility to identify and rate a network as extensive as ours were critical factors in our selection of the NetCountant Accountability platform.”
Apogee’s accountability product achieved further success at Fidelity Investments, an international independent fund management organization, where projected first-year cost savings after system implementation were expected to exceed $11 million.

Service Bureau/ASP

Switch Management

Established in May 1999, Switch Management offers its WebCDR wholesale billing service, which features automated data collection, processing, reporting and bill presentment via the Internet. The product includes revenue assurance functionality that calculates profit or loss on every call and summarizes the data into more than a dozen reports and charts.
WebCDR’s quality of service management capabilities inherent in its traffic analysis reports and charts graphically display trunk group loading in 5-minute intervals over a one-week period to clearly show under and over utilized resources.
Dynalink Telecom Controller Grace Wang says, “Since replacing our in-house billing system with WebCDR, we now spend 90 percent less time each week getting out invoices.”
Jeff Teo, president of Regal Telecom, said that WebCDR cut his company’s related costs six-fold in the first month.

Integrated CRM Solution

Telution

In Telution’s work with Netifice Communications, the company employed its Communications Exchange product to replace Netifice’s homegrown customer relationship management suite.
Telution aided Netifice in pushing information between back- and front-office systems, enhancing customer interaction and self-care. It simplified the customer service representative’s job by including a quotation engine and allowing more access to information to respond to customer needs.
In just four months, Netifice had achieved a 10 to 15 percent improvement in recurring and usage-based revenues. Customer information going into Netifice now populates every necessary department’s system; billing errors are more easily detected; and the company now processes two to three times more orders per week based on a reduction in the back-office life cycle.

Billing Excellence Awards Finalists

Best Overall Product
Amdocs
Apogee Networks
Geneva Technology
Portal Software
Xacct Technologies

Best New Company
CTI Group
Mentis Broadband Solutions
Openet Telecom
Switch Management
Wmode

Best New Product
ComArch
eVergent Technologies
Exstream Software
Martin Group
Xacct Technologies

Customer Success Story
ACEComm (Level 3 Communications)
ADC (Virgin Mobile)
Digiquant (Electric Lightwave)
Financial Statement Services Inc. (Verizon Wireless)
Mentis Broadband Solutions (AT&T Broadband)

IP Billing
ComArch
Digiquant
Geneva Technology
Mind CTI
Portal Software

Wireless Billing
Amdocs
Convergys
Info Directions
Portal Software
Sentori

Systems Integrator
American Management Systems
Cap Gemini Ernst & Young
Deloitte & Touche
KPMG Consulting
PricewaterhouseCoopers

Billing Financial Software
Apogee Networks
Cibernet
Group 1 Software
Vertex
Vibrant Solutions

Service Bureau/ASP
Convergys
Electronic Data Systems
EUR Systems
Info Directions
Switch Management

Integrated CRM Solution
Avolent
Davinci Technologies
DST Innovis
Jones Cyber Solutions
Telution