In the Zone at MetraTech

After facing off with Amdocs and NetCracker Technology during a recent panel discussion at the Billing & OSS World Conference & Expo in Chicago, MetraTech CTO Doug Zone sat down with B/OSS editor Tim McElligott to discuss his company’s momentum and his belief that service providers are starting to come around to his guiding philosophy: That it’s not about billing for new services; it’s about enabling innovative business models.

MetraTech is a provider of billing, customer care and partnership management solutions. It is a relatively small company as billers go – based in Waltham, Mass., with sales offices in London, Dusseldorf, Paris and San Francisco. Its 60 or so employees are scattered throughout and so are its customers. Clients include Swisscom, BT, Bell Canada, Telus and EchoStar.

In February, Yankee Group named MetraTech as one of its companies to watch in the BSS space in 2008, thanks to its cost and performance profiles, open business logic and dynamic view of how business models evolve and transform in highly competitive markets such as telecommunications, said Paul Hughes, vice president of enabling technologies research at Yankee Group.

Hughes said that MetraNet, the company’s flagship product, is highly competitive within the customer care, settlement and billing solution market segment. He added that MetraTech is promising to automate fast-moving, complex and divergent business models, and has been delivering this reality in the more complex segments of the billing and customer care market for almost 10 years.

Zone said that the last two years in particular have shown that the company could deliver solutions to a variety of industry segments as well as outside the industry. The company now handles billing for the City of Chicago around both of its major airports: O’Hare and Midway.

Telecom, however, is where the real interesting challenges are, Zone said. And because they are forced by competition to be more adaptive, Zone said MetraTech’s focus on supporting innovative business models rather than static billing systems is well-positioned to help service providers meet those challenges.