Gentlemen, re-start your engines

Intertech re-launches image and product If you are looking for the Intertech booth at this week's OSS 2001 conference in New Orleans, look under "A" for Abiliti Solutions. The company will launch a new corporate identity this week and will be demonstrating a retooled billing system that boasts one of the fastest rating engines in the industry.

"We have done a lot of things in the last 18 months in terms of enhancing our product and building a new management team. It's really a much different company than it was 18 months ago," said Gordon Quick, president and CEO of Abiliti Solutions.

As Intertech, the 12-year-old company posted customer wins with Ameritech, SBC Communications and other large carriers. The company also had some early success in the competitive market with companies such as Allegiance Telecom, Mpower Communications and Williams Communications. As Abiliti Solutions, the company will focus on delivering to those accounts and re-entering the competitive landscape with renewed vigor, Quick said.

"The company had a lot of success at the end of '98 getting new customers, but we lacked a little in the final delivery to those customers," he added. "So I have focused extensively ... on delivering on all the commitments to those customers and deepening those relationships."

In addition to creating a new corporate image and assembling a new management team, Abiliti Solutions has redesigned the Intertech billing system.

The NetworkStrategies billing application suite is one of few solely Microsoft-based billing systems on the market. "We don't do anything on any other platform, and we think this gives us [an] advantage because when you start building product[s] to cross multiple platforms, you have to make some compromises," Quick said. "Despite what some people in the telephony industry think, there really is not a better managed platform than the Microsoft SQL server Windows platforms."

Within the NetworkStrategies suite is Abiliti Solutions' BillingCentral application service provider billing solution, which now provides Web-based visibility into each phase of the billing cycle. The software will page users and inform them that particular processes have been completed. This way service providers can approve each phase of the process before triggering the next to begin.

"We have done a tremendous amount of work to get away from the notion of hard-coding and make it so customers can configure [options] for themselves," Quick said. "It only involves them in the process when and where they want to be involved."

The biggest change to the company's technology is with its latest version of event processor. The EventProcessor 7.0 was clocked at processing 62 million call detail records per hour through internal benchmark tests performed at the Compaq Computer test center in Houston.

EventProcessor will be sold as a stand-alone product and as part of the NetworkStrategies suite. "We recognize that customers may want to use our rating capability and use a different billing system, so we have an [interface] that links to other kinds of databases," said Rolando Espinosa, senior vice president of marketing and business development for Abiliti Solutions.

Processing 62 million call records per hour is a significant accomplishment when compared with competitors that offer single-digit processing power. While time and success will judge Abiliti Solutions' new processor, not all companies measure performance the same way.

"There isn't really a standard for measuring scalability. Different companies measure it differently," said Ander Garmendia, director of marketing at Daleen Technologies, one of Abiliti's competitors.

At the end of February, Daleen will launch its newest BillPlex product, which will process 7.8 million records per hour.

"Those [other] numbers have never been reached in real life with any of the customers we have worked with," Garmendia said. Daleen measures scalability by the number of accounts that can be supported by a billing system and how easily it scales. Its next release will take it from supporting 5 million accounts to 20 million.