Ron Whaley, chief revenue officer at OSG Billing Services, says he isn’t afraid to close his portfolio in the middle of negotiations and walk away from a potential partnership if it doesn’t feel right. He and his company did not walk away from the table with Cycle30. Instead, the two companies joined forces to bring a hosted Tier 1 billing solution to the mid-tier telecom market.
Cycle30 is a subsidiary of GCI, an integrated, communications service provider based in Alaska. The companies teamed on a new converged solution for GCI, which they will launch on September 1. GCI is a multi-technology provider that delivers services over its telecom, cable and utility networks.
Jim Dunlap, president of Cycle30, was the chief information officer at GCI and managed the company’s back-office transformation. He presented a case study of the project at the Billing & OSS World Conference in Washington, D.C., in June. About the formal announcement in late July of this OSG relationship he said, “We value OSG’s longstanding success and their commitment to always putting the customer first. With OSG’s experience in invoice presentment and distribution, our joint customers can feel confident that their customer billing is being sent accurately and on time.”
They can count on a few other changes as well. As part of the agreement, OSG will provide its marketing expertise to transform customer invoices into critical communications tools. The companies see the invoice as a way for operators to build and establish relationships with subscribers.
While mutual admiration for each other’s customer service philosophy is evident, Whaley said there were other attributes of Cycle30 that told him the companies and their people were good partner material. “We really like the fact that they are a hosted provider, but also that they are [part of] an operator,” Whaley said. “We like that they have built as team of professionals that know the business and how they treat their customers.”
He also got to see how parent company GCI treated its vendors. OSG was providing services to Alaska DigiTel when GCI acquired the company in early 2006. “I got to see how people were treated through that acquisition and I liked the professionalism with which they treated us through that transition,” Whaley said.
It doesn’t hurt that OSG was retained to do business with the new owners. OSG will now be providing bill presentment services for all GCI customers in the cable, telecom and utility spaces. Cycle30 also will employ OSG’s transpromotional billing and marketing expertise.
Cycle30 is targeting the mid-tier market in North America, which it describes as 1.5 million subscribers and below. It is using a hosted business model to deliver billing, ordering management, provisioning, mediation and revenue assurance functions. Its diversified workforce is located in either in Seattle, Denver, Scottsdale, Ariz., or in the On-Demand Center in Philadelphia.
Cycle30’s underlying billing solution comes from Comverse, which developed a hosted version of its Comverse ONE Billing and Active Customer Management solution. This gives Cycle30 and OSG’s mid-tier customers Tier 1-like capabilities such as a single data model, a single product catalog and an open framework for converged billing.
Although OSG has other partnerships for end-to-end billing solutions, Whaley said that being a hosted provider and part operator makes a big difference. “If you’re a race care driver or mechanic, you know how your engine should sound. What I love about these guys is they know what an operator wants to see and how they want to control it,” he said.
