Out of the blue

Bluespring Software co-founders Larry Davis and Erik Zigman traveled the high-tech road for three years before developing a hybrid billing and operations support system platform they could believe in.

“It was our philosophy that we wanted to have something that was real before we went off and started selling something that didn't exist. We're not fans of selling paper-ware,” said Davis, vice president of product management for Bluespring.

So the company built an OSS with a business focus rather than a network and technology focus and found a service provider, erbia, that believed in its vision.

“Being able to bill for service that you can't provision is no better than being able to provision a service that you can't bill for,” Davis said. “You have to solve the business problem of being able to turn a customer up with operational excellence as well as providing a complete, accurate, clear and concise invoice that gives them the kind of services they want, when they want it, at a price they're willing to pay.”

Bluespring's Priority CS suite has four components that manage points of customer exposure to a provider's business. Those points include provisioning, order management, billing, customer care and business management. The first component, Priority CS OneOrder, manages order entry, order management and workflow management.

“It's an integrated order entry application that handles both billing order entry and network order entry,” Davis said.

The next component, Priority CS OneRate, has full rating capability for single event- or aggregate-based rating. Priority CS OneBill provides a consolidated invoice for services or products that the service provider has defined in its product package. Lastly, Priority CS OneCare provides the Web-based self-care and customer-service component for payments, credits, adjustments, pre-billing, post-billing and inquiries through a single customer interface.

“What we've done is to kind of isolate [our system] from network technologies so when the next network technology comes along, we're not reinventing the wheel,” Davis said.

erbia started using Bluespring in June 2000. “We were using a platform that was just not strong enough,” said Richard Gibbs, president and chief operating officer of erbia. Bluespring had a lot of different platforms that it could bring together very rapidly, which fit the profile erbia was looking for, Gibbs said.

The switchless long-distance reseller uses Bluespring's billing and OSS software to manage workflows and multiple supply chains, fulfill customer requests, price transactions, bill for services rendered, collect receivables and account for revenues and margins.

Bluespring has partnered with Metric Group for system integration and delivery and uses a Windows-based application programming interface to link its suite of components together and to third party applications.

The company embeds partners' components into the application or aligns with a company to deliver an application, Davis said.

Bluespring has a good handle on the integrated communications provider market, said Jason Briggs, senior analyst in the billing and payment application strategies practice at The Yankee Group.

“This out-of-the-box approach they're taking is definitely very strong,” he said. “But as [they] move up tier, [they] will have more difficulty selling this end-to-end type solution to larger carriers.”

Bluespring chose a Windows 2000 platform over Unix because it has the flexibility the company wanted. “[Windows] offered the most for our customers in terms of total cost of ownership as well as benefits from a familiarity standpoint from the end-user community and even from an operations standpoint,” Davis said.

The suite also is built to be adaptable. The data model leverages XML as well as relational database technologies such as MS SQL and Oracle.

Bluespring at a glance

Primary investors

• Blue Chip Venture Co.
• Primus Venture Partners

Integration and software associates

• Metric Group has a system integration deployment partnership with Bluespring
• Vertex provides telecom tax capabilities for Bluespring's customers

Industry organizations

• TeleManagement Forum, associate member
• Windows Telecommunications Alliance
• The Association for Communication Enterprises
• The Oracle Alliance Partnership
• The Compaq Solutions Program

Source: Bluespring

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