As Microsoft transitions to a software-as-a-service model and makes a push for Exchange Online and SharePoint Online services to the small- to medium-sized business market, it has turned to the ultra-versatile MetraTech to provide charging and settlement.
MetraTech has not limited itself to the telecom billing space and as a result has deployed at a diverse cross section of industries. The company supplies billing, charging and settlement solutions for everything from ski-lift tickets to landing and takeoff charges at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport.
“The hallmark of our system is to do billing for things that are nontraditional. Billing for new business models is not something that is different for us,” said Scott Swartz, founder, president, and CEO of MetraTech.
This flexibility of the company’s MetraNet solution — along with the proofing it had done providing solutions for Microsoft’s Live Meeting service — won MetraTech the job. Richard Koh, a director at Microsoft, said, “MetraTech has been an extremely important contributor to the successful launch of Microsoft Online Services, keeping pace with our aggressive delivery schedule throughout.”
MetraNet has been deployed as the billing and partner settlement solution for Microsoft Online Services. MetraNet has been integrated with Microsoft’s Online Commerce Platform as well as its order entry and service activation processes. With MetraNet, Microsoft is able to reliably bill subscribers and automatically compensate partners for their customers’ subscriptions to its new services.
“Customers see Microsoft’s interface to the shopping cart and are tied back to our product catalog to see what they can put in the basket,” Swartz said.
Research and analyst firm, Gartner, expects online services to mature rapidly with mainstream adoption in 2010 and 20 percent of enterprise e-mail seats to use SaaS in general by 2012. "Online services usher in a new era for SaaS in the form of a substantial new offering for buying and consuming collaboration software,” said Norbert Scholz, research vice president at Gartner.
MetraNet can dynamically model business processes and financial models in order to reduce implementation time to 20 weeks or better.
“Things get pretty sophisticated when you’re dealing with Microsoft because of their very large customer base and breadth of the products,” Swartz said. “But if you look at the time frames here, you can see we aren’t ripping apart the core product to get it done.”
Swartz points to his company’s dynamics business model as key to its ability, as a relatively small vendor to serve the likes of Microsoft. “A lot of billing companies that became successful were fortunate enough to ride what I call ‘the replicator market,’” Swartz said. By this he means all the CLECs that came to market in the last decade or so had the same requirements and the same business models. It was a matter of getting one service provider customer and replicating the process everywhere else.
“That’s great. The customers got great value because all they were trying to do was replicate what someone else was doing. It made sense,” Swartz said. “But these days I don’t know where you can go on the planet where some type of service is sold the same way as someone else. That’s not a winning strategy.”
Those companies MetraTech has sold to all do different things or are trying to do the same things differently and now, Swartz said, their legacy billing systems have become part of the problem.
He claims that his system has separated not just the business logic, but also the work flow processing, the data model sand even the application interfaces from the underlying technology and this gives MetraNet the flexibility to address any billing requirement.
Microsoft appears to agree.
MetraTech has its headquarters in Boston with offices in San Francisco, Frankfurt, Paris, Singapore, Rio de Janeiro and London.
