Billing one bit at a time: Intertech builds off Microsoft relationship to grab new carrier business

Building a business off new carriers is nothing new. In fact, an entire industry has formed during the last five years to serve the needs of competitive local exchange carriers, most ofwhich don't have the financial resources to command the best attention from traditional vendors.

Intertech, a St. Louis-based billing company, however, is getting a little help in its effort, namely from Microsoft. Aligning itself with the Redmond, Wash., giant as a Microsoft Certified Solution Provider (MCSP), Intertech has developed its billing and customer care software to run on Windows NT and structured query language (SQL) servers. Its latest release of Network Strategies supports the Enterprise editions of NT 4.0 and SQL 6.5.

"Everyone's claiming to be Windows NT because that's where the market is going, but not everyone has it in their product," said Mark McCormack, executive vice president of Intertech. "What we're doing is providing an end-to-end Microsoft solution."

"We've done a lot of dealing with them that put our relationship beyond the normal MCSP," said Tom Rodger, director of marketing for Intertech.

The combination of companies allows emerging carriers to get the reliability of a giant such as Microsoft while maintaining the cost efficiencies of smaller vendors such as Intertech, said Jonathan Usher, Microsoft's telecom industry marketing manager.

Additionally, the company has taken a unique approach to carriers of all sizes. Instead of presenting itself as a billing consultant that builds systems for specific customers, the company has developed 12 modules that can be interchanged depending on the carrier's need. In contrast, other billing vendors tend to develop systems specifically for larger carriers and scale down their solutions for emerging players, said McCormack.

"The end result is the same, but we're not redeveloping. The benefit of that is in time to market. A lot of our competitors have a product that they have to constantly re-engineer," he said.

The company provides a facilities management option whereby it will install the system and train carrier personnel for a specific time period, after which the carrier takes over. As a third option, it offers a service bureau, something that many CLECs have shown an interest in, said McCormack.

"In general we are seeing CLECs going for the service bureau, but it really depends on the corporate model. Royce Holland [CEO of Allegiance] believes in outsourcing everything, whereas a company like Qwest is more interested in running its own system," he said.

The latest addition to Intertech's client roster, The Williams Companies, opted for a site license. As part of the process, Intertech took Williams' asynchronous transfer mode data through an entire event process that included passing cells through switches, accounting for them and billing. At its height, the system handled 43 million transactions an hour, said McCormack.

It's just those types of green field situations for which the company is best-suited.

"It's a very different approach to implementation," McCormack said. "If you go into an existing customer, you have data conversion and a lot of people that are used to doing things a certain way. Also if we're going into a new customer, in a lot of ways we're competing against the legacy application."

Still, the company has managed to get some bigger carriers on board, including U S West, Swiss Telecom and GTE. However, it's the emerging carriers, especially those building Internet protocol (IP) networks, with which McCormack sees the greatest opportunity.

"How do you deal with a busy signal on an IP telephony call?" he asked. "Do you bill people for dropped calls? Those are questions we need to answer and because we're smaller we can take advantage of those opportunities."

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