Enabil gets Ground-Floor Opportunity With Virgin Mobile Canada Launch

At 3 years old, Virgin Mobile Canada is arguably still a start up. But the company’s recent launch of post-paid services is certainly new and provided a ground floor opportunity for Enabil Solutions to provide the wireless provider with managed customer care and billing services.

Virgin Mobile Canada (VMC) selected Calgary, Alberta-based Enabil in March of last year, but the deal is now public and Enabil has been working on the configuration, implementation and overall management of their Aurora platform, which will support Virgin’s entrance into the post-paid cellular market.

Enabil’s Aurora is a convergent billing platform that offers an open architecture and a configurable, high-speed rating engine. It will provide VMC with end-to-end customer care, including collections management, real-time credit checking, real-time order creation and service provisioning, multiple payment processing options, flexible rating architecture and dynamic invoice generation.

The Aurora platform was developed using Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management as its backbone, which Oracle built from its acquisition of Portal Software in the summer of 2006 for approximately $220 million. It will help VMC bill and manage all communication services from a mediation, rating and billing perspective within a single environment.

Andrew Black, CEO of Virgin Mobile Canada, said in a statement that the flexibility of Enabil’s customer care and billing platforms will allow his customers to react quickly to new product and service promotions, change their rate plans, upgrade their hardware and take control of their services without being bound by stiff contractual obligations or hidden fees.

Ian Heap, director of architecture at Enabil Solutions, said VMC is in the process of transferring customers who chose a post-paid model onto the Aurora platform. The company already has some high-profile customers in Canada and elsewhere, including Telus Quebec, SaskTel, Bell Aliant and Latitude Wireless.

“At a high level, we are a customer care and billing company, but we also support a lot of the processes around wireless and telco billing,” Heap said.

The Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment (EBPP) solution is a standalone system that can work with other billing and customer care system vendors. Enabil also provides a point-of-sale (POS) solution that supports provisioning and activation for all VMC’s channels.

“Every Wal-Mart, Best Buy and Virgin kiosk across the country use our e-POS Web-based application to do activations for Virgin Mobile Canada,” Heap said.