APTIS RELEASES BILLING AND CUSTOMER CARE SUITE

Aptis Inc. a subsidiary of Billing Concepts Corp., announced its release of Aptis ICP, a software suite for billing and customer care. The software is designed to meet the needs of integrated communications providers, especially the CLEC market and VoIP companies, and to be Web-enabled, platform-independent and remotely accessible.

Aptis ICP provides tools for order fulfillment, service assurance, and billing and rating. The system’s hierarchical account structure is designed to accommodate mergers and acquisitions, new market penetration, and large, multilevel corporate billing. It also has multiple APIs for integration with OSS and other product interfaces, such as mediation devices, provisioning systems or third-party devices. Billing output interfaces are also provided for general ledger, direct debit or credit payment. The Aptis Desktop Framework is intuitive and employs a three-tier architecture using Java Servlets. It runs on UNIX, Windows NT or AS/400.

The company also announced it will provide new and existing customers with Inter Carrier.ICP, its CABS offering, in a shared hosting environment. Inter Carrier.ICP is an intercarrier settlement and management system. It offers access monitoring, reporting and tracking designed for reciprocal billing between ILEC and CLEC carriers under the business rules of intercarrier agreements. Contracted services in the outsourced environment will be priced per event.

Aptis is also introducing an advance funding program for carrier access billing. Many companies experience delays of up to 120 days in receiving payments from carriers that use their network. Under the terms of this program, qualified participants may be advanced up to 80 percent of their receivables within 5 days of reporting intercarrier billing.