BillMax was built by an ISP with a focus on scalability and reliability.

by Jeff Goldman [March 19, 2008]

The iSpark Group was founded in 1994 as the Texas-based ISP FastLane Communications. Like many others in the same market, BillMax was first developed as the ISP's own in-house billing solution. When FirstWorld Communications (now Data393) purchased the ISP business in 2000, FastLane became The iSpark Group, offering BillMax billing software as well as consulting services.

Company vice president Bill Schoolfield says FastLane had initially developed BillMax out of necessity. "At the time, there weren't really many ISP billing packages out there, so we developed our own," he says.

BillMax (877) 245-5629 sales@billmax.com

And that development, Schoolfield says, is ongoing. As the ISP industry has matured, iSpark has continued to expand BillMax's functionality. The product is now designed to support everything from basic ISP billing to wireless hotspots, VoIP, and more.

To that end, Schoolfield says, iSpark is currently developing the third generation of the software, doing a complete rewrite of the fundamentals of the system to integrate that new functionality in a straightforward manner. "We're trying to address those different needs in a little bit more of a standard fashion across the board, having out-of-the-box solutions for each of those markets," he says.

Scalability and flexibility
Overall, Schoolfield says it's the solution's scalability that really makes it stand out in the marketplace. "BillMax was written from the very beginning to be fast and efficient at what it's doing, and as a result, we've been able to benchmark BillMax at upwards of 500,000 customers… we can process a lot of data at volumes that most of our competitors can't," he says.

The software runs on Linux and uses MySQL as a database—and most of the source code, Schoolfield says, is made available to users. "When you buy BillMax, you're not only buying a billing and provisioning and CSR application: you're also buying a platform from which to tailor the product to your needs," he says. "If there are any modifications you need, you can make those in BillMax—it's not a closed system."

And it's well documented. "All the APIs are described at length," Schoolfield says. "In fact, our documentation set, which we're kind of proud of, is over 1,000 pages. So there's a lot of detail and a lot of information about BillMax that's available to clients that have that need. And our experience is that almost every ISP is different—they all have their own needs or beliefs about how the application should operate—so we try to accommodate as much as possible."

The fact that the user interface is accessed through an ordinary web browser, Schoolfield says, has proved to be a key strength. "Last year, a company out of a small town in Colorado bought BillMax simply because there are periods of the year that they're snowed in," he says. "They literally can't make it to the office. And so in that instance, these people are just working from their homes, and they're able to do that because of the beauty of the web … our native interface from the very beginning has always been basically a web browser."

The company also offers merchant services and billing fulfillment services through partnerships with e-onlinedata, Authorize.Net, and Databill.

Pricing and support
For potential purchasers to get a sense of the product, both online and downloadable demos of the software are available. "People can run the product for six, seven, eight weeks, get their feet wet, and decide whether or not BillMax meets their needs," Schoolfield says.

Pricing for the software itself is structured per user. "BillMax is licensed by the number of active customers that you're billing or managing," Schoolfield says. "The pricing starts out at around $2.50 an account—and as you purchase more accounts, that per-account price comes down."

Ongoing support and upgrades are available through a maintenance program called Value Pack, which is available on a subscription basis starting at about $100 per month. "That gets you basically unlimited technical support, it gets you discounts on future license purchases, it gets you the software upgrades when they're released, and it gets you extra license keys for running multiple version of BillMax for failover reasons," Schoolfield says.

On the other hand, more independent customers can simply pay the one-time license fee, and that's it—they can get support from the company's online forums as needed, and never have to pay another fee. "And we do have customers like that, that are happy with the products, and we don't see them for quite a while," Schoolfield says.

Ultimately, says company CEO Paul Slezak, it's the solution's reliability that really makes BillMax stand out. "We have people running the billing platform for years without ever having to take the machine down," he says. "And because of its reliability and accuracy, we've had cases where people have been able to reduce the billing department by over 50 percent. That's really where the value comes in: the customers get a product that they can rely on."

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