Billing Software, Systems and Solutions

MetraNet: 4th generation, SOA compliant billing product enabling organisations to achieve strategic advantage through Dynamic Business Modeling

MetraNet Overview

MetraNet is a charging, billing, settlement, and customer care product.  Delivering Dynamic Business Modeling, MetraNet enables any number of business models to be supported across any industry providing any type of service.

MetraNet can support any variation in any financial relationship including:

• Business-to-Business (B2B), such as wholesale, brokering, federated, SaaS or advertising
• Business-to-Consumer (B2C), including content, automated fare collection and multi-play
• Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C), such as community auctioning or virtual markets
• Business-to-Partner (B2P), for example mobile content settlement or digital TV content

MetraNet can support any variation in any business model including:

• Event, Usage, Subscription and Seat-based
• Residual Cost
• Revenue Sharing
• Advertising
• Cost-Plus

MetraNet can process any revenue or lifecycle event from any service infrastructure or network, including:

• Transportation – including Airport Charging, Congestion Charging, and Mass Transit
• Media and Entertainment – Including IPTV, Digital Content, and Pay-per-View TV
• SaaS and Cloud Computing – including Seats, Application Usage, Bandwidth and Storage
• Telecom – including Voice and Content for GSM, UMTS, CDMA, IP, Tetra, GPRS
• Commerce – Including Financial Settlement, Mobile, Digital and IP Commerce

MetraNet is industry and service agnostic in the sense that it does not dictate processes, workflows, data models or interface mechanisms, but rather allows these to be configured from first principles. As a result, MetraNet conforms to the business rather than requiring the business to make compromises to accommodate the product. We term this singular capability Dynamic Business Modeling.

MetraNet is based on the concepts of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), whereby new services can be easily created, added to, or replace an existing set of services.  An example of such a service is ‘compensate supplier’, which specifies a series of steps in the re-distribution of revenue to suppliers in a value chain. The creation of these services is entirely managed through metadata. No coding or development is required.
This approach has the benefit of freeing users from the underlying technology, enabling them to express their business intentions more succinctly. 

Our Value to your business is: 

Innovation

• Freedom to innovate any service down to its core constructs via configuration without limitation
• Freedom to innovate how services are marketed, sold and managed across the entire value chain

Speed to market

• Successful implementations in as little as 8 weeks
• Configuration of new products and services within minutes
• Dynamically support new business processes without customization or upgrades

Independence

• Reduce the reliance on the software vendor by allowing functionality and business logic to be enhanced independently
• Installation and maintenance of the product in production through third parties or via own IT/Billing department
• Independence and anonymity for how the product is used for strategic purposes

Low Cost

• Reduce acquisition, activation and customer support costs through ‘Zero-Touch’ and ‘One-Touch’ customer interaction via self-care and automation of customer care processes
• Reduce OpEx through minimal staffing for integration, operations and upgrades
• Reduce CapEx through deployment of the product on commodity software and hardware
• Ability to upgrade rather than re-implement enables the benefits from ongoing R&D to be realized

Summary of MetraNet Functionality

• Charging – applying a rate, price or charge to an activity based on business requirements defined in metadata rules, rates, price plans and discount plans. All events are immediately guided to an account for invoicing, reporting and interfacing applications.
• Billing – creation of invoices, reports and statements for retail, wholesale, government or other commercial uses, based on event charges, periodic charges, seat-based charges, discounts, taxation and one-off charges. All billing data is persisted within MetraNet, and is available to any interfacing application.
• Settlement – management and calculation of compensation between multiple parties such as commission payments and revenue shares, based on B2B, B2C or any other model. Supported settlement models range from simplistic arrangements between two parties to complex multi-party models.
• Customer Care – web-based application which enables Customer Service Representatives, customers and partners to activate and manage accounts throughout their lifecycle.

MetraNet is an end-to-end solution, also providing functionality in the following additional BSS domains:

• Product Catalog – provides a web-based, zero-client capability to manage all product definitions, discount structures and pricing plans as well as their associated effective dates.  The catalog has been designed for maximum ease of integration using XML, and can be configured to exactly match  products and services relevant to any industry, including dynamic creation of a data model using the industry’s or customer’s naming conventions to capture all relevant data.
• Partner Management – provides the entire lifecycle support for partners and their specific settlement model including self-care.
• Internationalization – MetraNet currently produces invoices and settlement statements for over 81 countries, 26 currencies and 12 languages, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Chinese.
• Order Entry – Event-based and sequential workflows, both internal and external to MetraNet, are configurable via a drag-and-drop application to support complex order entry and service activation processes.

Product Modules

MetraNet consists of the following applications, which are available separately to solve a particular solution requirement, or as a whole: 

• MetraConfig: Business model configuration for Business Analysts and IT
• MetraOffer: Product and service offerings and business rules for Product and Marketing Managers
• MetraView: Interactive reporting, EBP&P and self care for customers and partners
• MetraCare: Customer care and account management for Customer Care Representatives
• MetraControl: Operations, control and billing management for Billing Operations and IT
• MetraPay: Secure electronic payment engine for interfacing to payment gateways
• MetraPartner: Partner management and revenue sharing engine for settlement models
• MetraBill: Business flow driven billing engine
• MetraConnect: Secure multiplatform integration toolkit for system integrators and IT

To learn more about MetraNet download Introduction to MetraNet.