Thanks to its Synchronized Business Infrastructure, Inovaware's PRISM billing and customer care software provides larger ISPs with a fully integrated suite of solutions for every aspect of ISP management.

by Jeff Goldman [September 4, 2001]

Back in 1990, brothers Bruce and Greg Kim founded a bulletin board in Hawaii. Four years later, they'd transformed their bulletin board into an ISP business. Like many other ISPs at the time, they built their own billing and customer care solution, and began marketing it to other ISPs as well. In 1996, they sold the ISP and, along with co-founder Marc Rapoza, they created ISP Power, a billing and customer care software company.

In December of 1999, as part of an effort to expand its target market beyond ISPs, ISP Power changed its name to Inovaware. In the eighteen months or so since the name change, Inovaware has shifted its focus from smaller ISPs to those with over 50,000 subscribers—as well as data centers, web hosting companies, ASPs, and others. Currently, about 300 companies are using Inovaware's PRISM billing and customer care solution.

Inovaware (808) 539-3786 info@innovaware.com

Key to the solution is the concept of a Synchronized Business Infrastructure, a pre-integrated suite that covers account management, hardware and software provisioning, billing, customer self-care, marketing, and customer support. Michel Floreani, Inovaware's Direct of Business Development, explains that the pre-integration of the various elements is a crucial asset.

"If you look at traditional billing vendors, they usually provide a billing and a rating engine, and customer care is done by CRM vendors—or they do some kind of customer care and account management, but it's pretty light," he said. "We're trying to provide a more comprehensive platform that includes it all, so you don't have to buy two or three different applications from different vendors, then integrate it all together."

All-in-one
PRISM runs on Windows NT or 2000, using either SQL Server or Oracle as a database. The system integrates with any RADIUS server, as well as a number of accounting packages and other applications. Floreani notes that, since 1996, the company's seen enough different scenarios that it's unlikely there's a package out there that they haven't had to work with at one point or another.

As a whole, Floreani says, the PRISM solution is extremely flexible—and as the company's grown, it's only become more so. "It's really customizable," he said. "For most of the clients that we're selling to now, there will be some customization issues, because they're not smaller service providers that want things straightforward. They'll always have certain business requirements."

A good example of that kind of flexibility is j2 Global Communications, Inovaware's largest customer with over 4.5 million subscribers. "They were our first big customer back in '98, and we had to customize the software quite a bit for them," Floreani said. "They needed some features that we didn't have in our software, like a telephone number inventory, so we built that for them."

The flexibility extends to PRISM's rating engine, the component that enables creation of pricing and discounting structures. "When we created the rating engine and the whole PRISM platform, we made it so that it's service agnostic—not only for ISPs but for other types of services as well," Floreani said. "It can rate on any data that you can collect and then feed to the rating engine."

This enables what Floreani calls target area marketing, allowing the dedication of specific services to specific markets. As an example, Floreani, says, let's say you're offering services in the US and in Japan, with different prices and different value added services in each region. If a customer calls in, say, from Japan, the customer service rep will only see the appropriate prices and services for Japan; and if the customer visits your web site, it'll ask for his content information, then show him the appropriate offering.

Pieces of the puzzle
Supplementary modules are also available which can be added to the basic PRISM offering. The PRISM Marketing Suite gives an ISP the ability to manage all aspects of a marketing campaign based on trends determined from customer data. The RESOLVE help desk management system covers everything from automatic ticket assignment to a range of customer self-service solutions. And all modules are part of the Synchronized Business Infrastructure, which means there won't be any integration issues.

Pricing for PRISM starts at around $70,000 for the license, not including implementation costs. Additional modules, such as the Marketing Suite, require additional fees. After the first year, a maintenance fee, 10-20 percent of the license fee, provides support and upgrades. "We're cheaper than Portal, but we're fairly expensive if you're just a mom-and-pop ISP," Floreani said. "We're probably not a good fit for that."

Inovaware can handle the implementation of the software, or it can be handled by one of the company's systems integration partners, such as Deloitte & Touche. Floreani recalls that in ISP Power's early days, ISPs could easily implement the software themselves—but as the software has become increasingly complex, it's become crucial to use outside services.

And, Floreani explains, the setup process can be as extensive as you need it to be. "If you have a legacy system that you want to replace completely, we'll do everything from the database migration to all the tracking and the gathering of technical and business requirements," he said. "We'll

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