Daleen, Eftia link billing and order management

Complementary products and eight joint customers have led Daleen Technologies Inc. and Eftia OSS Solutions down the partnership path. The companies announced last week that they are integrating their product sets and creating more robust application programming interfaces that will tightly couple Daleen's billing software and Eftia's order management capabilities.

Daleen's BillPlex software provides convergent billing and customer care, while Eftia's Master.Scribe enables order and service management. The combined capabilities should allow carriers greater efficiency and reduce time-to-market costs.

Fewer duplicated data entries and a consolidated view of the order management and billing functions can be expected.

"The [competitive local exchange carrier] market has selected us as a de facto team," said James Daleen, CEO at Daleen. "We decided to add more value to our products by integrating them and combining the back-office applications to the billing software."

To integrate the products, engineers will use the Business Object API provided by the BillPlex Enterprise Application Framework and the Master.Scribe Object Description Interpreter. Engineers from both companies are creating the interfaces, and Daleen predicted that carriers will use the resulting product sets within the next six to eight months.

"It's a good move for both companies," said Karl Whitelock, program director for Stratecast Partners. "It's a natural fit for Eftia to have interconnections with a billing organization because it completes the order process."