Daleen's international pastime: Software company plays it a customer at a time

In baseball they call it "mo" - short for momentum. Teams always are looking to get some on their side. A two-out RBI can spark a little mo. A double play can kill it.

In the software game, Daleen Technologies has got the mo. With a string of recent customer wins and the substantiation of its rating technology by the U.S. Patent Office, Daleen's mo should continue beyond its internal record-setting second quarter earnings.

The e-business software company, specializing in billing and customer management, reported a 115% increase in second quarter revenue. Daleen earned $11.5 million in the second quarter this year compared with $5.3 million for the same period last year.

It may be a coincidence, but since Daleen was awarded a patent in June for its "dynamically configurable and extensible rating engine," the company has enjoyed somewhat of a hot streak. It has signed customers such as InQuent Technologies, an application and Web-hosting company; DV2, an Atlanta-based integrated communications provider (ICP); and NetworkOSS, a service provider of hosted operations support system solutions.

Even if the patent didn't spark the company's mo, the diversity of Daleen's customer base - its three newest customers in particular - reflects the strategy that went into the design of its rating technology.

"We knew we would have to build a software system that can handle the billing and rating for any kind of service that we currently know about, plus anything that is going to emerge that we may not know about today," said Frank Dickinson, chief operating officer for Daleen Canada.

To accomplish this, Daleen took two fundamental pieces of the rating process and separated them. "Then we put them into mechanisms that allowed them to be changed, extended or modified without changing the core product," Dickinson said.

The two pieces are the rating control data and the rating plug-in. Rating control data manages the different data elements that affect how the rating process occurs. Most billing systems can make changes to sets of data fields to affect the way something is rated, including changing the rating of a call from one-minute intervals to one of seconds or changing time-of-day cutoffs, Dickinson said. Not knowing what data elements would eventually be required, Daleen developers created its software with flexibility and the future in mind.

"We created a way for users of our system to make [the data elements] available for use by the second part of the invention, which is the rating plug-in," Dickinson said.

The rating plug-in contains the algorithm that does the calculations on the data and creates the transactions necessary to produce a bill.

The system is adaptable to many vertical markets without making changes to the core product. Extracting the two most critical pieces of the billing process allows Daleen to build pre-configured billing software "packages" for each market segment.

NetworkOSS is targeting each of these markets and has contracted with Daleen to provide billing services to all of them. "They address a market segment that has converged players that have multiple services they want to bill for. They have an excellent product for that," said Steve Queroli, chairman and CEO of NetworkOSS.

Daleen has tried to apply the same flexible philosophy to customer care. "They recently acquired a customer care package [from Inlogic Software] that they are moving along pretty quickly and turning it more into an [electronic customer relationship management] package and integrating it with their billing package," Queroli said.