In the Zone at MetraTech

“We believe a billing system’s primary job is the enablement of innovative business models. We do not deliver, as a primary value add for example, a great new discount event. We deliver a way to imagine the most innovative discount and provide a method for putting that into the system proactively without having to code it,” Zone said.

Technically, that is done by separating all business logic from the underlying transaction processing core of MetraNet. The business logic is defined not in code, but in metadata. “That way, when a service provider wants to develop something new, they can specify that in metadata without touching the core [software],” Zone said.

“We have always been on the edge of mainstream models, but we are now becoming more mainstream because our approach to software is becoming the predominant approach to software. We just happened to be the first ones to apply it to billing,” Zone said.

Stratecast Senior Consulting Analyst Karl Whitelock lent some support to this claim in a recent whitepaper called “Supporting Business Transformation: More than IT can handle.” Whitelock wrote that because of the demands on Business Support Systems by service convergence, “assumptions governing systems development and implementation projects only a few short years ago are no longer valid in today’s changing business environment.”

Whitelock agreed that dynamic business modeling functionality is becoming a core IT requirement. He said that where there is a recognition that the dynamic capability of business change is essential, MetraTech should be given consideration and that “the MetraTech product approach offers a number of significant business benefits, the most pronounced of which is an ability to rapidly address changing business strategies.”