INTERVIEW Simon Adams - Intelligent Technologies
“For one distie alone, we process approximately £70 million per annum in Microsoft. We can do the same with
AWS and Google Cloud. “ Simon Adams, CEO of Intelligent Technologies (PRD)
Billing the cloud
In this interview Simon Adams, CEO of Intelligent Technologies (PRD), spoke to Comms Business about the
cloud consumption landscape and how his business is helping partners process and bill in a new era
Comms Business Magazine
(CBM): Can you give us an
update on the business and
how you have coped with
lockdown?
Simon Adams (SA): We can see
the call data coming through
from our customers, obviously
some of them have gone down
quite a lot. ose are mostly in
the hospitality sector, but we
are hoping some of that starts
to come back now. For a few
customers we have given them
a payment holiday where they
can use the system and we will
help support it. So, I feel like
we have helped where we can
and hopefully those customers
will get back on their feet and
stay with us in the long-term. I
think this is a time we all need
to change a little bit more and
support customers where we
can.
CBM: Have you seen projects
put on hold?
SA: We have had a few, but
mostly the bigger ones where
they need project managers
onboard and people to manage
the migration projects. ose
can be quite complex. We
might have to add more
interfaces and APIs into third
party systems, and although
we have the resources to do
the work the companies we are
working for don’t want to start
until the project managers are
back, it’s essentially a logistics
issue. We are expecting things
to get started over the next few
months as normality creeps
back in.
CBM: How has your R&D been
impacted?
SA: We have actually been able
to accelerate our development
in some areas over this time.
We are a month away from
being able to integrate our
solution into the Microsoft
Partner Centre application
programming interface for
Azure and other MS services.
is will allow Microsoft Gold
Partners and distributors to
provision MS services through
our platform.
We are seeing more Microsoft
Gold Partners now and they
all have to meet certain
requirements. One of these is to
have a provisioning system into
Microsoft. I think this is a huge
opportunity for us.
More telecoms resellers
are now reselling Microsoft
services. We have a new
platform for CSPs (Cloud
Solution Providers) as well
as a converged platform for
resellers covering both sectors.
For one distie alone, we process
approximately £70 million per
annum in Microsoft. We can
do the same with AWS and
Google Cloud.
We have also been working
on more automations and API
integrations. Our objective
is to make telecoms billing
as simple and automated as
possible, reducing resources
needed to manage the billing
processes and to maximise
use of data for reporting and
analytics.
We now process
approximately 4.5 billion
transaction per month. We
process every landline call in the
Netherlands via the incumbent
there KPN (Essentially the BT
for the Netherlands).
CBM: Are your services 100%
in the cloud now?
SA: All our customers are
now on our fully cloud based
platform. e “Billing Bureau
Service” option is nearly at
an end, because the billing
platform is so automated that
it does everything the billing
bureau services used to do,
including near real-time access
to billing data and reports,
auto-collection of data etc.
e platform simply does
everything for you.
We gained a new customer in
September 2019 and converged
3 billing platforms into a single
platform. e client didn’t
think this was possible, but it
resulted in them redeploying
billing sta as they no longer
needed a big team to handle
billing because we automated
and converged the process. It
saved this client a fortune.
CBM: How is this new level
of automation impacting
your customer satisfaction
scores?
SA: Every year we conduct
an independent client survey
to ensure we listen to the
customers. Our customer
satisfaction results are equal to
Net ix and Amazon using the
same methodology they do.
However, we are not resting
on our laurels. Our next target
is to match the same score as
Apple and I am pleased to say
we are not far o achieving
that.
28 | Comms Business Magazine | August 2020 www.commsbusiness.co.uk
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