ISP Billing Solution Total-e v.2.0

TeleKnowledge's Total-e 2.0 is a billing solution for service providers with modular and scalable features. It is designed to handle an unlimited number of services and complex business relationships.

by Wayne Kawamoto [February 17, 2000]

TeleKnowledge, Inc. recently announced Total-e version 2.0, a customer care and billing solution that's specifically designed for content and service providers.

While traditional billing systems may be built around single or bundled services, TeleKnowledge's Total-e, according to the company, is designed to accommodate an unlimited number of services. The system supports a variety of pricing parameters that can include network usage, customer profiles, behavior patterns, and more, and has the ability to incorporate metrics that measure the level of service perceived by customers or delivered to them. The system also lets content and service providers create new pricing plans to respond to competitive threats or customers' changing perceptions.

Manage each relationship
To ensure that providers can effectively track and manage the flow of revenue and payments between themselves and their trading partners, Total-e offers an ability to capture business rules that govern each relationship, monitor events such as impressions, click-throughs and e-commerce transactions that are relevant to the settlement of payments, and manage and evaluate the profitability of every ePartnership. According to the company, as the number and complexity of relationships between content providers, web portals, advertisers and other participants increase, this feature will be one that particularly appeals to content and service providers.

Modular features
Teleknowledge claims that the modular structure of its software allows users to add features without revising the core code. Teleknowledge claims that other billing software is not modular, and requires extensive revisions with each addition. A rapidly growing and diversifying ISP using non-modular billing software will eventually have unusable core code.

Teleknowledge's illustration of the modular advantage.

Pricing and availability
Pricing for Total-e is based on the total number of service instances, billable events, and/or other value-based metrics. The product is available now. The Total-e multi-tier architecture utilizes Oracle8 and supports both UNIX (Solaris, Linux and HP-UX) and Windows NT server environments. The Total-e user interface layer requires either a Windows NT or Windows 2000 desktop environment.

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