Narus teams with major billing players

Narus penned two deals last week that should give the Internet protocol application analysis company a stronghold in the traditional and the Internet service provider billing world.

Solect Technology Group and Narus formed a strategic marketing and sales alliance that will offer service providers customer care and billing solutions that incorporate Narus' semantic traffic analysis technology. STA lets carriers view what applications customers are using, without eating up network resources.

"More and more companies are realizing that the only way they can scale and offer value-added services is using semantic traffic analysis," said Ori Cohen, co-founder and CEO of Narus.

The packages sold by the companies will be aimed at providers that want to offer value-added services such as voice over Internet protocol and streaming video.

"The value-added services really require different types of billing," said Mark Farmer, product manager for Solect. "What Narus is providing us is a unique technology that allows us to do application-level analysis."

On the more traditional billing side, Amdocs announced that it will integrate Narus's STA technology with its Ensemble customer care and billing platform. The solution will allow telecom companies to offer usage-based pricing for various IP services. Moving deeper into the telecom side was an important move for Narus, which found most of its allies in the ISP world. "Amdocs is the first traditional billing company that we have teamed with, and I think you will see more of these in the future," Cohen said.

In related news, Narus announced that it secured $25 million in funding, bringing total investments in the company to $30 million. Among the investors are MediaOne Ventures and Frontier Internet Ventures.