MCM began as a developer of two-way radio and paging software, but the company now offers ISP billing software with a focus on simplicity and ease of use.

by Jeff Goldman [October 6, 2004]

MCM Technology was founded in 1999, but its roots go back much further than that. Ted McMaster, now the company's CTO, started in the software business in 1978. "I was actually privy to the pilot course in binary mathematics in the United States Navy in 1959," he says. "So I've been around computers a long time."

The company has long been focused on software related to pagers and two-way radios. McMaster says MCM's billing software, MCM Realtime, was initially developed as a customized solution specifically for an ISP in Maine. "At that time, there were some super packages out there, but there was nothing that was totally integrated to general ledger, AP, and those types of things," he says.

MCM Technology (877) 626-6156 sales@mcmtechnology.com

It's the company's wireless background, McMaster says, that provides its greatest strength. "In paging, we're very strong—and in two-way servicing, we're very strong," he says. "We are the only company that has a complete suite of software to handle all of those solutions at one time. People sell asset management, they sell ISP billing, they sell paging—but none of them sells all of those things integrated together."

McMaster says the latest improvement to the MCM Realtime software has been the addition of integrated credit card billing. "Our system sends the request to the bank, the acknowledgement comes back from the bank, and we automatically load it into our database so they don't have to do any data entry," he says. "All they've got to do is verify the numbers and push a button."

Keeping it simple
Bob McMaster, MCM's Vice President of Sales and Marketing, says the aim is to make the solution as easy as possible for the ISP to run. "We want to make it a single entry system so the operator or the customer service rep sets up the customer within the billing system, and it does everything else that needs to be done: e-mail accounts, bandwidth, passwords, and things like that," he says.

The essential aim, he says, is to minimize personnel costs. "We're looking at efficiency," Bob McMaster says. "How much does it cost you to maintain your billing system? How much does it cost you in employees? What is it costing you to get your billing out, to do your collections, to manage your business? We're trying to reduce the number of actual warm bodies you've got to keep on staff."

The software makes all billing information available in real time. "We break down financial information in a plethora of ways," Bob McMaster says. "So if somebody wants to run a P&L on a POP, for example, they can run it any time they want, in real time, and it tells them exactly where they stand. The accounting function is critical to us, because it's critical to the investors or the owners of the ISP."

The company works with ISPs of all sizes, though Bob McMaster says a smaller ISP with fewer than 2,500 accounts probably wouldn't be able to afford the solution. For an ISP with 5,000 users, he says, "Our system would probably run them—and we do the installation, the training, data transfers, all of that—between $20,000 and $25,000."

Supporting wireless providers
In marketing the solution, MCM has been focusing on the wireless industry, particularly on wireless shops that are just now entering the ISP market as WISPs. "Wireless people are diversifying," Ted McMaster says. "There are a lot of companies that, because of wireless, are going to become ISPs."

Particularly in rural areas, Ted McMaster says, a lot of service shops are being forced to take on additional offerings. "Nowadays, to fix a radio, you just buy a new one," he says. "You don't really fix it. Technicians are few and far between, because they're not needed any more. So people must diversify to stay alive. It's not optional—they have to."

Tom Davis is Senior Systems Engineer at Communications Specialists, which provides two-way radios, pagers, and ISP services from its headquarters in Wilmington, North Carolina. The company was founded back in 1954, added paging in the '60s, and moved into the ISP business five years ago. As an ISP, it offers dialup, DSL, and wireless access.

In the late '90s, Davis says, the company found that its billing program was not Y2K-compliant, so they began searching for a new solution. Davis met Ted McMaster at a paging conference, and checked out MCM's offering. "One of the things I like about it is it's done in a FoxPro-compatible database," he says. "I can go in with FoxPro and do whatever I need to do, create my own reports, that type of thing."

Thanks to MCM's variety of offerings, Davis says, he's also able to use the software to do asset management for Communications Specialists' paging services. "It maintains the inventory of the stock that we've got for rental or retail, and tracks its use down to the customer," he says.

Overall, Davis says, he's satisfied with the product. "It keeps track of the money, and it works very well," he says

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