MARKET REPORT Billing
Billing
Services for
Bu siness
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With some cloud services suppliers offering very short-term agreements billing systems today need to be
multi-tasking; they need to accurately track and charge usage or consumption of services and applications
as they are turned on and off by users and resellers. So how good are they?
The business world is
accustomed to using
cloud-based services;
messaging, uni ed
communications, accounting –
you name it there’s at least half
a dozen apps for it. e market
is highly competitive for all
business applications and one
of the di erentiators is o ering
users shorter and shorter
contract terms.
is poses di culties for
suppliers brought up in the
days of ve or more year service
contracts that used to sell a
service and then, basically,
forget about it. In a cloudbased
world that practice is not
sustainable.
With suppliers o ering
very short-term agreements
billing systems today need to
be multi-tasking; they need
to accurately track and charge
usage or consumption of
services and applications as
they are turned on and o by
users and resellers. ey need to
alert suppliers to any changes in
user ‘consumption’ of services
instantly.
But rstly,
Are organisations still buying
CPE-based billing solutions
in these days of cloud-based
business applications?
Shaun Bodsworth Managing
Director of Inform Billing, says
“ e overwhelming majority of
resellers assume that everything
is cloud-based these days and
expect billing software to be too
- as these are the solutions they
are selling into their customers
and they expect the same
bene ts. Inform Billing has
invested heavily in recent years
in a modern, secure, completely
cloud-based infrastructure, and
as a result for the past two years
have o ered this as standard.
e subject of hosted or
on-premise rarely comes into
conversation, however we have
created exible solutions so that
when a customer speci cally
wants to install on-premise
or most typically, in their
own infrastructure, we
can accommodate that
too. It will always be a
requirement for some who
need full control over
their data security where
the end-client’s data is
especially sensitive. is
requirement is rare and
normally only applies to larger
resellers who have the technical
capability to accommodate
the hosting, of what is still
a cloud-based platform, just
within their own cloud.”
Shaun Bodsworth Managing
Director of Inform Billing
32 | Comms Business Magazine | October 2019 www.commsbusiness.co.uk
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