With a focus on flexibility, Jet is designed to provide billing and user management for everyone from tiny startups to large ISPs and universities.

by Jeff Goldman [May 2, 2007]

Obsidian Consulting Group was founded six years ago in Melbourne, Australia, with a focus on web application development and on the development of Jet, the company's billing and user management system. "When the company formed, we already had the beginnings of the Jet product, as well as a handful of other ideas," says company director Kevin Littlejohn.

Littlejohn's background, he says, is in ISP systems administration—he's worked at a number of different Australian ISPs, including Connect.com.au. "In that capacity, I've had to build a new traffic-counting/billing system for pretty much everywhere I've worked," he says. "That's given me some great opportunities to see what the challenges are in growing a billing system from the several hundreds users category all the way up."

Obsidian Consulting Group +613 9355-7844 sales@obsidian.com.au

And Littlejohn says Australia has the most ISPs per capita in the world. "We have a huge churn of new ISPs at the small end of town," he says. "We'd seen a number of small ISPs attempting to grow and finding themselves blocked by the ability of their billing system. Particularly where ISPs have started with an in-house billing system, they often find they grow beyond their ability to maintain their own system."

As a result, Littlejohn says the aim in developing Jet was to build a solution that was affordable enough for the entry-level market but could also scale easily. "To that end, we have two product lines—Jet Lite, which is essentially an off-the-shelf piece of software, and Jet Enterprise, which sells with access to the source code and to our developers to help organizations modify the system to meet their requirements," he says.

Highly customizable
The customization that comes with Jet Enterprise, Littlejohn says, is a strong selling point—he says Obsidian has done everything from integrating with third party devices to building captive portals for wireless hotspot operators. "We also been able to provide some startups with more interesting billing and credit-back systems to really differentiate themselves in the market," he says.

The same is true for ISPs that want to add voice and/or video services. "Adding new sources of data into Jet is reasonably straightforward, and Jet is able to bill your customers for all their services on a single invoice," Littlejohn says. "We're currently doing a lot of work around rating table management for voice billing, as well as usage imports."

It's also easy to customize the web interface. "The entire site is built in a templating language that makes changing the look and feel of the system simple—there's about five files in total that define the overall structure of the site, and there's a through-the-web editor that will let you make more basic color-and-log style changes, if that's all you want," Littlejohn says.

That's also true for invoicing. "We've used SVG files to define the invoice layout, and provided through-the-web tools to define the colors and text," Littlejohn says.

On top of Jet's basic functionality, a range of additional modules are available to do everything from voice billing to LDAP support—and the company will also design custom modules as needed.

Open technology
Jet's code also contains what Obsidian calls 'sitecode' hooks that make it easy to for programmers to drop their own code into the run paths of the system. "If, for instance, you need to provision Web accounts on service creation, a small piece of sitecode can be added to SSH to a remote machine, or XML-RPC post, or whatever else your particular platform requires," Littlejohn says. "Likewise on invoice generation, account suspension, crediting accounts, RADIUS authentication, and a host of other spots. This gives the network operator the ability to integrate the billing system properly into the rest of the services."

Jet is based on a number of open technology platforms, including Python, Zope, MySQL, Apache, and Debian, which Littlejohn says provides a key benefit to Obisidian's clients. "Should a company's requirements change, our customers know they have access to a pool of developers and the source code, to enable them to continue to grow their business without being locked in by their billing system," he says.

Jet is supported on Debian Linux and RedHat RHEL4, and will operate on Solaris, FreeBSD and OS X. "With the exception of a small number of modules, most notably the RADIUS module, Jet can run on MS operating systems also, but this is not recommended—we do some development on Windows, primarily to ensure that our code remains as cross-platform as possible, but it really isn't a target platform," Littlejohn says.

Pricing
Basic pricing is AU$5,900 (approx. US$4,900) for Jet Lite, and AU$16,636 (approx. US$13,900) for Jet Enterprise—both versions come with a 12-month support contract, and the Enterprise version adds 10 hours' priority support per month. Emergency support is available for an additional fee.

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