MetraTech CEO to Deliver Keynote for Financial Services fCLOUD© at Cloud Computing East

Unlocking cloud services potential through Behavioral Billing™ 

WALTHAM, Mass., May 20, 2013 – MetraTech Corp., the leading provider of Agreements-Based Billing™, commerce and compensation solutions, today announced that Founder and CEO Scott Swartz will deliver a keynote address at the Cloud Computing Association’s (CCA) Cloud Computing East 2013. The event is taking place at the Marriott Boston Copley Place in Boston from May 19-21.  Scott Swartz will present an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) case study in his keynote titled, “Make Billing Behave” as part of the Cloud Computing for Financial Services fCLOUD© track on May 20 from 2:30 to 2:50 p.m. ET. 

Financial services firms, utilities, healthcare and businesses in other industries can create pricing models to drive customer behavior and service stickiness. As companies move their businesses to the cloud and offer more cloud-based services, they must determine how to best monetize business models. In his presentation, Scott Swartz will discuss the need to maintain elasticity and flexible pricing to support differentiated business models — not just simple, recurring subscriptions — to enable cloud-based service providers to fluidly adjust price points based on usage or other behavior. 

“Because the cloud-based delivery model is based upon flexibility and on-demand delivery, the billing structure underpinning these services must be just as elastic,” said Scott Swartz. “While this may not have always been the case, more cloud service providers are now adopting flexible pricing models, including peak and off-peak rates to drive customer behavior.”

MetraTech Releases MetraNet 7.0 at TM Forum Management Nice

Behavioral billing enables customers to easily pivot products, pricing and business models 

Nice, France, May 14, 2013 -- MetraTech, the leading provider of Agreements-Based Billing™, commerce and compensation solutions, today announced the availability of MetraNet® 7.0. With this latest release, MetraTech builds upon its agreements-based billing and real-time Commerce Decision Engine™ with the introduction of Behavioral Billing™ and multi-party settlement capabilities. Service providers now have an unlimited ability to create pricing models that drive customer behavior and compensation models that drive channel behavior based on any product or service attributes spanning arbitrary collections of accounts. MetraTech service providers’ customers can use the intuitive now-cast dashboard to modify their behavior to manage costs or meet commitments. Release 7.0 is being deployed by seven MetraTech customers.

Communications providers have long used pricing models such as peak and off-peak rates to drive customer behavior. While commoditized away in the long distance market, this approach has re-emerged in cloud, smart grid and other markets. MetraNet easily supports these simplistic models as well as more sophisticated models for differentiation. For example, a cloud provider with a newly deployed data centre in Amsterdam might want to provide discounted pricing for large compute instances run in the new, underused data centre. Users who would otherwise use an over-extended node in their region could take advantage of the new data center by meeting a minimum financial or compute-hour commitment. Similar nuances can be used to drive channel behavior. MetraNet’s metadata-driven architecture enables granular transaction data to be captured and analyzed so that these models can be tweaked or entirely changed.

In addition, bill shock has been a persistent issue for service providers. While solutions exist to address this issue for consumers, MetraNet now solves the problem for multinational customers with tens of thousands of accounts, spanning multiple services, pricing models and currencies. The intuitive now-cast dashboard provides insight into the current and projected position of agreement terms, commitments, discounts, and single and multi-bucket pricing models. Based on this information, customers can modify their behavior to manage costs or meet commitments. In addition, threshold-based notifications can be configured for any metric.

MetraTech founder and CEO Scott Swartz said, “MetraTech created a monetization platform that can apply corporate wide insight that provides customers with the visibility they need to make strategic decisions. Using our metadata configuration, they can quickly configure enterprise agreements unlocking the potential for service providers.”

Other highlights of MetraNet 7.0, can be found in the MetraNet 7.0 data sheet.

MetraTech will showcase its Behavioral Billing, real-time Commerce Decision Engine and other technologies at booth #69 on the exhibition floor at the 2013 TM Forum Management, in Nice, France, May 14-17, 2013.

MetraTech Adds Automated, Flexible Billing Functionality to Metanga® Cloud-Based Commerce Engine

Metanga makes it easy for customers to support new differentiated business models including custom packages with optional products, amendments and continuous billing features  

WALTHAM, Mass., April 17, 2013 – MetraTech Corp., the leading provider of agreements-based billing™, commerce and compensation solutions, today announced new features for Metanga, its SaaS commerce solution. The enhancements support user-friendly and flexible billing experiences, eliminating the reliance on a one-size-fits-all subscription model and reducing the need for manual agreement changes, proration calculations and billing statement changes. The features include the addition of optional product choices, amendments and continuous billing, letting organizations cater to diverse customer needs and more efficiently manage their revenue.

Today, service and product providers offer competitive pricing solutions by grouping related products into bundles. When companies create bundles, there is often a required minimum service or product in the agreement terms. For example, cable providers often offer TV, Internet and voice services as one package, but consumers understand that purchasing more than one service will result in a cost savings. Often there are additional related products that can be added to a bundle but are not required for purchase, such as premier movie channels, sports channels or DVR service. These are often sold as options with the required service. With Metanga’s flexible, transparent new product features, companies can easily add new services, make adjustments to existing packages or renegotiate service bundles, ensuring billing accuracy for every customer.  

PT Infinys System is a hosting cloud provider with product offerings that support a variable capacity model that meets its customers’ internal demand fluctuations with cloud billing. Its infrastructure can rapidly provision services needed by customers. Throughout a billing period, requests from customers to purchase additional services occur frequently. “With Metanga’s amendments functionality supported by continuous billing, our billing team now efficiently responds to service changes,” said Dondy Bappedyanto, general manager of PT Infinys System. “Customers are invoiced accurately and immediately, relieving our billing team of time-consuming manual calculations.”

New capabilities for Metanga include: 

• Optional products: As companies offer more a la carte products or services with their bundling or packages, billing and management functionality must accommodate consumers’ pick-and-choose shopping habits. This feature ensures customers are billed accurately for their customized packages, increasing their satisfaction and their potential lifetime value.
• Amendments: Enables a service provider to start and stop billing for optional products throughout the lifecycle of the subscription. With Metanga, every aspect of the subscription, including start date, end date, quantity and pricing, is modifiable without restrictions, and changes are automatic and accurate.
• Continuous billing: As customers renegotiate agreements and make services and use changes, this feature eliminates the need for time-consuming manual calculations and adjustments. Metanga generates a single invoice or multiple invoices reflecting all credits and charges, depending on the billing team’s preference. 

Mike West, vice president of Saugatuck  Technology said, “When you are selecting a billing system, flexibility is one key characteristic to look for. You want to choose a provider that can enable your specific monetization approach both today and in the future."

Since its release in June 2011, Metanga a leading service billing software,  has provided management of customer enrollment, product catalogs, recurring billing, promotions, invoicing, customer self-care and payment capture for customers in the cloud, financial, communications and media, transportation and utility verticals.

“One-size-fits-all products and services are outdated, as are one-size-fits-all subscription-based billing models,” said Scott Swartz, CEO of MetraTech. “To help enterprises respond to consumers’ desire for customization and personalization, Metanga’s new features create an adaptable, easy-to-use and accurate billing solution that provides access to a la carte services or products outside of stagnant, boxed packages.”

Additional resources: 

• Optional Products Video
• MetraTech blog
• MetraTech on Twitter

MetraTech Partners With MuleSoft to Automate Integrations for Metanga Customers

Leading Commerce and SaaS Billing Provider Launches On-Demand Connectivity to Leading Accounting and Financial Systems

BOSTON, MA – March 14, 2013 – MetraTech Corp., the leading provider of agreements-based billing™, commerce and compensation solutions, today announced an agreement with MuleSoft, provider of the world’s most widely used integration platform, to provide end-to-end solutions for connecting its Metanga® SaaS billing solution to SaaS and on-premise accounting applications. Powered by CloudHub, the award-winning integration platform as a service (iPaaS) from MuleSoft, the partnership enables Metanga to offer packaged integration apps that automate business processes across leading accounting applications, including Intacct, NetSuite (NYSE:N),QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Desktop and Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT) Dynamics GP.

Metanga is a commerce and billing engine providing management of customer enrollment, product catalogs, pricing, promotions, invoicing, customer self-care and payment capture for cloud, financial, communications and media, and transportation and utility verticals. Metanga supports end-to-end revenue models that enable billing functionality to extend into a CRM system like Salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM) and integration with financial applications. These integrations are supported through a through a robust set of SOAP and RESTful APIs. It is designed to facilitate consumption-based billing for online applications that require more than simplistic recurring credit card billing. By coupling Metanga with leading financial management applications, customers are provided with a sophisticated billing capability to expand their service offerings.

“Metanga customers are looking for the shortest path to monetization for their cloud-based offerings,” said Esmeralda Swartz, CMO of MetraTech. “With the integration apps that we’ve built on CloudHub, it's fast and easy for our customers to connect Metanga to leading accounting and financial systems without the need for custom code. Metanga customers can preserve their investment in financial management applications, but are now empowered to take advantage of sophisticated subscription and usage billing. The speed and agility enabled by on-demand integrations, offers our customers increased scalability and flexibility as their business grows.”

MetraTech’s Metanga and MuleSoft offer five packaged integration apps, one to each of the following accounting platforms: Quick Books Online, Quickbooks Enterprise, Intacct, Netsuite and Microsoft Dynamics GP. These applications address the following integration scenarios most commonly faced by Metanga customers:

• Updating of balances for invoicing with complete payment synchronization between Metanga and accounting
• Synchronization of products with accounting to allow revenue categorization
• Automating the revenue reporting process by providing details of receivables and recognition codes
• Supporting dunning processes by associating revenues with synchronized customer accounts

"We're pleased Metanga has joined our growing ecosystem of SaaS providers that leverage CloudHub to offer seamless integration as a part of their offering,” said Chris Purpura, vice president and general manager of CloudHub at MuleSoft. "Connecting customers through custom point to point code doesn't scale or meet the multi-tenancy requirements of SaaS. The CloudHub SaaS partnership program is designed to help fast growth SaaS providers like MetraTech’s Metanga to automate business processes across applications, removing the largest friction point for new customer adoption.”

To sign up for the QuickBooks, Intacct, NetSuite and Microsoft GP integration applications from MetraTech‘s Metanga please visit: http://www.metratech.com/metanga/.

Media, Entertainment Leaders Share Best Practices for Digital, Mobile and Social Media Beyond Subscriptions, Basic Pay Walls at the Chief Digital Officer Summit

The New Role of Chief Digital Officer and the Future of Digital Broadcast   

WALTHAM, Mass., February 27, 2013 – MetraTech Corp., the leading provider of agreements-based billing™, commerce and compensation solutions, today announced that its chief marketing officer, Esmeralda Swartz, will moderate a panel discussion at the Chief Digital Officer Summit in New York City at Thomson Reuters at 3 Times Square on Thursday, February 28 at 11 a.m. ET. The panel includes expert digital strategists and practitioners, who will provide best practices to increase digital, social and mobile media opportunities in broadcast. In addition, the session will include a discussion on the evolving role of the chief digital officer (CDO) and the keys to unlocking new revenue opportunities in digital media.

The expert panel includes Albert Cheng, executive vice president and digital media chief product officer, Disney ABC Television Group; Daniel Heaf, executive vice president and managing director, digital at BBC Worldwide; Jason Seiken, founder of PBS Digital Studios; and Jason Tafler, chief digital officer at Rogers Communications. These panelists will discuss today’s digital media landscape, in which companies are sourcing, buying and reselling their content through multiple distribution channels, and consumers are accessing and consuming it through new digital platforms. Digital media product strategies must take into account content, digital quality, multi-platform support, multiple distribution channels, customer engagement across all devices and social media, and user experience.

To capitalize on digital resources, media companies need to move from traditional subscription models and basic pay walls to support personalized pricing, engagement metrics and business model elasticity. Rethinking platform, distribution and monetization strategies is critical to increasing revenue and profitability for digital products.

“The CDO’s role is of critical importance as companies look to grow revenue from their digital business. The key is to understand holistically how you can develop new products and maximize digital assets across the entire business,” said Esmeralda Swartz, chief marketing officer at MetraTech. “In the digital era, relationships and agreements between an organization and its customers and channels are fluid and must adapt to usage, offerings, engagement metrics and dynamic bundling between all parties. As such, companies will require unprecedented flexibility and customer analytics as well as a “now-cast” view of their business to create and deliver new business models, unlocking new revenue streams.”

The Chief Digital Officer Summit provides an opportunity to interact with and learn from some of the world’s brightest digital leaders about how they are addressing the challenges and opportunities resulting from digital, social and mobile media. Panelists and keynote speakers, including Vivian Schiller, senior vice president and chief digital officer of NBC News; Jonathan Miller, former chief digital officer of News Corporation; and David Payne, chief digital officer of Gannett Co., Inc., will discuss how to implement digital strategies, attract and retain the right talent, use optimal reporting structures, define clear roles and responsibilities, and provide competitive compensation to excel in the digital age.

Teddy Goff, most recently the digital director for President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign, is the closing keynote speaker. Goff oversaw more than 200 people who collectively raised more than $690 million, and generated more than 133 million video views. He built Facebook and Twitter followings of more than 45 and 33 million people respectively, and registered more than a million voters online. Goff will share best practices from his management of President Obama’s digital marketing campaign that included social media, mobile media and micro-targeting. The digital strategies used by the Obama campaign under Goff’s direction were extremely successful and widely credited as being a key factor in the President’s election in 2008 and re-election in 2012.

In addition to Goff and the keynotes, the agenda features digital leaders from more than 40 organizations, including Arnold, BBC, Clear Channel, Columbia University, Conde Nast Entertainment, Disney/ABC, Forbes, Harpo Studios, Harvard University, Kaplan Test Prep, Lincoln Center, LiveNation, Oglivy, PBS, Rachael Ray Digital, ReverbNation, Rogers Communications, Simon and Schuster, Universal Music Group, and Wenner Media, among others.

For more information about the Chief Digital Officer Summit, visit http://www.chiefdigitalofficersummit.com/

Additional resources:

• MetraTech blog
• MetraTech on Twitter