The latest release of the Platypus billing solution is targeted at webhosting companies, but it has lots of benefits for other providers as well.

by Jeff Goldman [November 8, 2006]

Why the name Platypus? Start with the words "web" and "billing," and it's an easy leap to make.

The Platypus billing solution was first released back in 1996 by Bill Ford, Grant Spradling, and Granville Barker as the first software product from their new company Boardtown Corporation. And when Boardtown was acquired by Tucows in 2004, life didn't change too much for Boardtown's employees.

Since the acquisition, the Boardtown group has remained in place in Starkville, Mississippi as Tucows' back-office solutions department, while the rest of Tucows operates from Toronto, Canada. In September of 2005, the company released Platypus 5.1, which added integration between Platypus and some of Tucows' key products.

Tucows 96 Mowat Avenue Toronto, ON Canada M6K 3M1 (800) 371-6992 info@opensrs.org

According to Ford, now Tucows' director of billing services, that integration was a key motivator for Tucows' acquisition. "Tucows, I think rightly, assumed that it would be easier for their resellers to more easily adapt to new products and services if they had a back office system that was able to easily integrate with those products out of the box," he says.

Version 6.0 of Platypus is coming out on November 15th, and Ford says it's the biggest upgrade they've ever done. While the original solution was designed specifically for ISPs as access providers, 6.0 is all about accommodating the needs of webhosting providers as well. "We want to make sure we're giving those guys the same level of niche functionality," he says.

Driving the process
At the same time, the key strengths of Platypus remain. "Platypus' purpose in life is to take care of subscriber management, billing and provisioning," Ford says. Without a true integration between all three, he says, you're not getting any real benefit out of your billing system—and Platypus is designed to actually drive the process, not just take notes.

That drive, Ford says, is a key strength of the software. "There's a big difference between mailing someone an invoice and actually driving the process of collection," he says. "When you're driving that collections process, you're also doing things like charging late fees and sending late notices, making sure that they can pay online if they want to, even if they normally mail a check in."

The same is true, Ford says, of the company's Wombat helpdesk software—when a customer sends in an e-mail, it's converted into a trouble ticket, sent to the right person, escalated if necessary, and a survey is sent to follow up. "Instead of just storing information, which is good, we take it a step farther by trying to actually drive problems into solutions," he says.

New functionality
Key to the new release is integration with a range of hosting control panels, including cPanel, Plesk, H-Sphere and Ensim—and Ford says the integration goes far beyond the basics. "Your simplest integration between a billing system and a control panel would be that the billing system would push information to the control panel and say, 'We need to create this customer and give him this product,'" he says.

With full integration, again, it's about driving the process. "You've got the ability for the billing to drive upgrades, downgrades, suspensions of service, and complete deletions of accounts as they go away—and in fact, one step farther than that is the ability for the control panel to tell the billing system that some sort of billable event has occurred, like they've added that 21st e-mail address," Ford says.

Another key addition for 6.0, Ford says, is support for nested, bundled services. "You may have one service, like e-mail, that also provides alternate services like anti-spam and other content filtering—and that product may get offered by another product, like a bundle that comes with a domain registration—and all that may belong to a webhosting bundle," he says.

While previous versions of Platypus did allow you to define packages, Ford says, there was no sense of a relationship between the individual services. What you get in 6.0 is support for a tree structure, with logical relationships set up between different offerings. "The benefit of that, apart from it making more sense when you look at a paper statement, is that provisioning becomes so much more logical," he says.

Service plans are also much more flexible in 6.0, making it easier to negotiate aspects of a deal differently for each customer. "In previous versions of the software, they would have to create a different rate plan each time, and they'd have thousands and thousands of plans defined," Ford says. "But now they can get in there, change prices, descriptions, add components, and have complete control—it's pretty nimble."

Reports and pricing
Platypus, as before, runs on Windows and uses Microsoft SQL Server, though there have been some other changes to the system. "A big change we made back in 5.1 was that we moved from our ASP web pages to PHP, which gives people the option of running their web server on either Windows or UNIX," Ford says. "A lot of people like that."

Similarly, Ford says the reporting functionality has expanded gradually over the years. "We started off with a package of reports, and now they've grown to over 200 reports that are distributed with the product," he says. "And they're written with Crystal Reports, so if you own a copy of Crystal, you can make modifications to the reports, or create your own reports and add them in."

Pricing for the service starts at $99 per month for up to 1,000 subscribers. From 1,001 to 5,000 subscribers, the price is $199 per month, and from 5,001 to 10,000 subscribers, it's $299 a month. Beyond that, prices are negotiable. All prices include maintenance and upgrades.

While the 6.0 release is the group's key focus for now, Ford says they won't be resting on their laurels once it's out. "We'll see how well we achieved our goal of making the hosting companies happy—and if we need to make some adjustments, you'll see 6.1 right behind it," he says.

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