For a company focused on the billing market, Geneva Technology Ltd.’s convergent billing software seems strangely unfocused on any one industry, and that’s how Geneva designed it.
As the United Kingdom-based company likes to tout, the software doesn’t care if it’s consolidating the billing process for service providers in the telecommunication, e-commerce, cable television or utilities markets.
“The main point of the software is the openness of the system,” said Idar Voldnes, president of North American operations for Geneva. “All it cares about is ratings and convergent billing.”
This do-it-all attitude enables Geneva to provide businesses with software to manage customer accounts, establish detailed pricing models and packages for billable services, charge for those services and generate customer bills regardless of service offering.
The company recently opened U.S. offices in Tyson’s Corner, Va.
At the core of Geneva’s software-already in use by communications carriers in Europe, including British Telecom, Czech Telecom and BT Cellnet-is an event-based architecture that is service independent. A scalable rating and billing engine handles the data associated with consolidating charges on customer accounts and generating bills.
Geneva’s rating module also includes a processor designed to handle the requirements of a range of markets, including telecommunications, Internet service provider, cable TV and utilities. User applications for maintaining customer accounts and rating and billing tariffs, as well as handling payments and debt management, are designed to run within a client-server architecture.
The Geneva software’s suite of open, documented and published application programming interfaces is designed to facilitate integration with existing providers’ infrastructure, such as finance and accounting, customer relationship management systems, mediation systems or other rating systems. Users are also able to add new services, tariffs and packages, without modifying the software.
“Telecommunications providers that wish to keep up with the fast-changing market require a complete, easy-to-deploy and highly scalable billing solution capable of invoicing a customer for any service to one account,” said Stephen Thomas, chief executive officer of Geneva.
In addition to its convergent billing capabilities, Geneva said the software handles the multiple-language, currency and tax requirements of providers that serve multinational customers and require products to be identified in the local language and priced in the local currency.
“The software is so open, we don’t need to do any sort of customization for our customers,” Voldnes added.
