Daleen finds southern comfort

NewSouth Communications said last week that it ousted its billing service bureau and hired Daleen's BillPlex. In less than 14 weeks, the Greenville, S.C.,-based competitive local exchange carrier deployed Daleen's billing software within its operations support system.

NewSouth intends to integrate BillPlex with Great Plains' accounting software, Eftia OSS Solutions' Master.Scribe order and service management product and E-Care from Inlogic Software.

By the end of July, NewSouth plans to combine E-Care and BillPlex and offer online bill presentment and payment to its 400 customers throughout the South-east. Long-term plans include offering online customer self-care.

Such aggressive plans led NewSouth to choose Daleen's software. BillPlex has a flexible, open architecture, which allows it to quickly integrate with other OSS software. It also lets carriers easily add new services.

"We are in the process of setting up Internet service," said Rob Whritenour, director of billing and information technology at New-South. "BillPlex allows us to deploy a new service within the system in a couple of hours rather than weeks because it's a table-driven system that requires file changes rather than hours of hand-coding."

NewSouth also worked with American Management Systems to integrate BillPlex within NewSouth's OSS. Going forward, the fledgling CLEC will handle upgrades and additions to its billing system.

"Our customers drive their own destiny," said Jim Daleen, founder and CEO of Daleen. "They want to control their systems, but we are often called to be consultants to ensure they are applying the power of the product properly. It's a dynamic of our value proposition that many of our competitors are not offering."