By providing Portal Software's Infranet solution on an outsourced basis, GlarNet is able to offer its ISP customers impressive functionality and scalability at a price even small operations can afford.

by Jeff Goldman [September 10, 2001]

V. K. Gupta, GlarNet president and chief executive officer, was with AT&T for 20 years before he left the company in July 1998 to found GlarNet. Gupta worked in a number of areas in his time at AT&T, but his last assignment was as part of the five-person strategy team that created AT&T's WorldNet Internet service. Gupta was assigned to set up the billing and related customer care functionality for the service, and Alex Gillon, now GlarNet chief Internet officer, was the chief architect for service as a whole.

In the process of developing the solution for AT&T, Gupta and Gillon quickly learned that a strong back office solution is key to success in the industry. And, according to Gupta, that's where the idea for GlarNet sprang from. "A lot of medium-sized companies and startup divisions of large companies do not want to spend a million dollars and six to eight months to set up this infrastructure," Gupta said.

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"Our thought was that if we create a high end, state of the art infrastructure, which we can then leverage to provide outsourcing services end-to-end, both for billing customer care and tech support in an integrated fashion, that would be attractive to these medium sized companies, because it will significantly reduce their time to market and their expenses."

Gupta had chosen the Arbor Platform, now Lucent Technologies' Arbor/BP Billing Platform, to build the functionality for WorldNet. When the time came to choose a solution for GlarNet, though, he decided on Portal Software's Infranet solution because of its strengths in an IP-centric environment. At the time, GlarNet was the only company that had an outsourcing arrangement with Portal, and Portal's sales force continues to forward leads to GlarNet.

Since then, GlarNet has also developed its own in-house solution as a lower-cost option for smaller ISP businesses. In addition, the company has a deal with PCAONLINE.com to license its PropWeb online help desk solution both as an online service and to support its agents. "We have a complete, seamless solution for the end user," Gupta said.

Fast, cheap, and good
Why decide on GlarNet? According to Gupta, the choice is obvious. "We bring a complete solution which is ready for market: we can deploy the total solution in four to six weeks," he said. "If they want to do it in-house, it's going to take them probably six months. And because we have very significant expertise, we can deploy the solution for them in a totally branded and customized fashion at a significantly lower cost because we reuse a significant amount of our intellectual property."

It's really the same argument behind signing up with any outsourced solution, and for an ISP that wants the functionality of Portal's Infranet software at a lower cost, it's a solid option. The outsourced solution includes everything from online and agent-assisted registration of customers to a complete billing solution that includes credit card processing and bad debt management.

"It's as complete a billing solution as you can get anywhere," Gupta said. "We bring a full package as if it's a totally in-house solution, and then additionally we provide complete billing customer care which includes both agent-based and online services, and also full tech support."

All data is hosted on GlarNet's end—Gupta notes that this allows a customer to take advantage of a level of support they might not otherwise be able to afford. "We have specialized web servers from HP to support the front end, and we use Cisco gear for communications," Gupta said. "It's a configuration which is comparable to what I used at AT&T to build WorldNet, where we were supporting 1.4 million plus subscribers."

Still, Peter Sandusky, GlarNet director of marketing, notes that all aspects of the solution are ultimately à la carte. If you need the billing solution without the customer care, or vice versa, they'll offer that as a separate option. If you want to use your own registration system, GlarNet will integrate with it in any way necessary. "We'll work with them," Sandusky said. "We create a custom solution to meet that customer's needs."

And Gupta adds that the expertise of the GlarNet team is a significant asset. Not only did Gupta and Gillon work together on the WorldNet project, but Patrick Kaelblein, GlarNet director of billing services, was also the director of billing for the WorldNet team at AT&T. "We bring a very, very powerful technology team, with expertise in high-end billing software," Gupta said.

Pricing for the initial customization and integration is on a time and material basis, and monthly fees for the solution itself are based on the number of active end users supported. Updates to the software are charged on a time and material basis, and if dedicated agents are used for support, there's a monthly fee per agent.

The key, according to Gupta, is that GlarNet is a great solution for a startup, and it can also easily support over a million subscribers. "A lot of our customers come to us when they're starting in the business, but potentially they will grow to hundreds of thousands of customers," he said.

Opting to outsource
Sonera Zed US is a subsidiary of the Finnish telecom company Sonera, providing a range of wireless entertainment from games to instant messaging for the 18 to 26 year old market. In August, Sonera Zed US announced the release of its entertainment offering over the AT&T Wireless network in the US—with GlarNet supporting the billing for the service.

For a low monthly fee, AT&T Wireless customers can subscribe to all of Zed's services, which is where GlarNet comes in. According to Rick Allen, Customer Care Manager for Sonera Zed US, the need to sign up customers separately from AT&T's own services provided a unique challenge.

"We had to outsource it," Allen said. "The internal billing system that we have is very robust, but it was not set up for direct-to-end-user billing or credit card billing at this time, so we needed to outsource that to get it up and running as quickly and as affordably as possible. And it was also important that it actually integrated with our billing systems so that they could automatically be provisioned in our system."

As a result, Allen recalls, the decision to outsource was relatively easy. "It was a combination of time and upfront money," he said. "By outsourcing it to a company like GlarNet, we were able to come to market with the subscription services very quickly, and it also was much more affordable than the upfront cost would have been to make the enhancements in-house."

With a combined need for a quick implementation and thorough integration with the company's own system, Sonera Zed US is a perfect example of the ideal GlarNet customer-and, Allen says, they're happy with the results. "It went very smoothly," he said. "They definitely added a lot of value and had the expertise in the billing area."

— End