Formerly known as Hawk-i, LogiSense's EngageIP solution reaches far beyond billing to help ISPs offer a wide range of services to their customers.

by Jeff Goldman [January 26, 2005]

LogiSense was founded in 1993 to offer billing solutions to a range of different online businesses. The company's first product, Hawk-i, was targeted specifically at ISPs. As the company began to expand its offering beyond billing and beyond Internet service providers, however, a new brand name was needed—and so, in early 2003, Hawk-i became EngageIP.

Brent Drewry, the company's Vice President of Customer and Marketplace Assets, says the change from Hawk-i to EngageIP involved a lot more than just a new name. "What we've done is significantly upgraded the application in terms of features, in terms of the interface—and added something very different, which was the integration with our own traffic management capability," he says.

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The company's traffic management solution, previously a separate offering, has now been integrated into EngageIP. "Early on in the fixed wireless market, we recognized the need for ISPs to marry those two technologies, to provision bandwidth capability right from the billing solution," Drewry says.

The idea is that a customer can go into a self-care interface, change their service package from, say, 256K to 512K, and have that provisioned automatically by EngageIP with no manual intervention. "To marry those two technologies together, we created EngageIP as the overall product name, EngageIP Billing as a standalone product, EngageIP Traffic Manager as a standalone product, and EngageIP Broadband Suite as an integrated solution encompassing both of those technologies," Drewry says.

A converged solution
This kind of convergence, Drewry says, is relatively new for the mid-tier market. "We've heard about convergence at a Tier 1 telco market for a number of years, but what we're seeing is traditional mid-tier ISPs that are moving into online data backup, they're moving into VoIP, or they're moving into Wi-Fi or fixed wireless," he says. "How do they put a system in place that will handle those kinds of new services in an automated way?"

For voice over IP, the EngageIP VoIP Billing Software module provides the ability to offer flexible calling plans to users. "If a service provider would like to provide a VoIP service package, they can take that to the next level, not just providing VoIP but providing a prioritized—down to a user level—package so that the bandwidth is prioritized for that application," Drewry says.

As more and more ISPs seek out products to help them provide a wide variety of offerings, Drewry says, LogiSense hopes to makes that search easier. "What we are for the mid tier is increasingly a one-stop shop, a pre-integrated solution that encompasses most of those things for that mid tier provider so they don't have to be the integrator," he says.

With the change from Hawk-i to EngageIP, Drewry says, the Web management interface also improved significantly. "It's a tab-based approached which has numerous levels of permissions, far more than we ever had in Hawk-i, so it's much easier to set up the application for a larger entity," he says.

The customer interface can also be fully branded, not only for the ISP but also for specific clients or locations. "If a hotspot operator, for instance, wants to offer this solution to hotels, airports, convention centers, and so on, those individual entities can have this solution branded as their own for billing purposes and on the self-care interface," Drewry says.

The EngageIP installation process can include both onsite and remote training. "We're much more interactive with our customers now in terms of identifying business process and working with them to deploy the system," Drewry says. "The system still lends itself to deploying it remotely and training them remotely, if that's what they desire—but we've extended that set of services so that we will deploy and train onsite as required."

Pricing for the solution starts with a base fee plus a per-subscriber fee. For a typical service provider deployment, Drewry says, that usually ranges from $50,000 to $200,000—including the base fee, per-subscriber fee, training fees, implementation, and support. Drewry says most of LogiSense's customers have somewhere between 10,000 and 250,000 subscribers.

Bending over backwards
Eastex Net is the ISP division of Eastex Telephone Cooperative, which was established in 1950. The ISP began providing services in 1999, and now has approximately 4,200 customers. Mike McTee, Eastex Net's Internet Systems Technician, says that when the ISP first launched, it used Inovaware's PRISM billing software.

McTee says they were happy with PRISM's performance, but found that support and upgrade fees gradually escalated, until Eastex began looking for an alternative solution in 2003. After talking to a number of LogiSense's customers and going through an onsite demo, McTee says, the company began testing EngageIP in August of 2003, and converted to the new system in December of 2003. "We took our time and made sure we eliminated any issues that might occur before the actual conversion," he says.

McTee says that LogiSense was extremely helpful in making the transition from PRISM to EngageIP as easy as possible. "There were many things that EngageIP did out of the box that PRISM was lacking in, so we ended up with a product that does much more than PRISM in a lot of areas, and was lacking what we needed in only a few areas," he says.

The fact that EngageIP is Web based and can be accessed from any workstation with Internet connectivity was a strong selling point, McTee says, along with the level of support offered by the company. "LogiSense is a very friendly, bend-over-backwards type of company that will do everything in their power to get the product to perform as it should," he says.

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