MIND CTI serves a wide range of providers, from mobile carriers to triple play ISPs, with a billing solution that's available on both a licensed and a hosted basis.

by Jeff Goldman [May 19, 2008]

MIND CTI was founded in 1991 as a provider of call accounting solutions, according to company vice president of professional services Tal Shain—the company, based in Israel, was incorporated in 1995. In 1998, Shain says, MIND began to take notice of the growing VoIP market and started offering a billing solution called MIND-iPhonEX, which was specifically designed for VoIP providers.

In the years that followed, the solution, now called MINDBill, gradually expanded beyond VoIP to meet the needs of ISPs that were providing a broad range of additional services. "We found that the best way to expand our activities was not to be just a VoIP provider but to be an 'any IP service' provider… it was very easy for us to get into that world, because we had experience with VoIP, which is an IP service, so we just decided to be oriented to all IP services," Shain says.

MIND CTI (877) 736-8674 sales@mindcti.com

While the majority of success stories on the company's website refer to telcos like China Unicom and SingTel, Shain says MIND CTI also serves a number of ISPs—particularly triple play providers. "For example, we have a customer called Iskon http://www.iskon.hr/ in Croatia. They started as a pure ISP providing dialup services, and after a while they started to provide broadband services, and now they are entering the triple play market," he says.

Scalability and flexibility
The company has spent the past few years switching the solution to a J2EE platform. One of the benefits of that shift, Shain says, is the ability to scale "from hundreds of thousands of customers up to millions"—and another is flexibility. "Because we are basing our solution on J2EE, we have an open platform: you can connect to any functionality using the API," he says.

While smaller customers are likely to stick with MINDBill for the product's full range of functionality (including AAA, provisioning and session control through the Service Enabling System), Shain says larger providers often have legacy systems they need to integrate with MINDBill—which is when the open platform and the straightforward API become particularly attractive.

In addition, Shain says, one of the company's greatest strengths is the ability to manage both prepaid and postpaid services on a single platform, even managing both options simultaneously for a single customer. "In this way, we can expand our activities for operators that provide on one hand, let's say, IP services for postpaid subscribers, but have some limited activities as well in the prepaid world," he says.

Both managed and licensed
MINDBill is available both on a licensed basis and as a managed service operated by MIND CTI. Logically enough, Shain says smaller providers tend to choose the managed service because of the lower startup costs. "They don't want to start with a large system with large expenses, so what we're providing is pay-as-you-go," he says.

And Shain says it's easy for a client to switch from one version to the other. "At the point that they're big enough or they would like to use their own stuff, they can purchase the license," he says. The transfer of data, as well as any necessary training, Shain says, are then included in the contract as part of the switch. "It's a very easy procedure," he says.

Pricing for the managed service, Shain says, is structured around a base monthly fee plus a fee per subscriber, while the price of the licensed solution is based on the number of CDRs as well as the number of active subscribers—the point being that the licensed solution serves both wholesale and retail providers, and has to be priced to meet the needs of both markets. "Some of our customers are purchasing a billing solution for wholesale, and in wholesale you have a few partners with millions of CDRs," he says.

A key aspect of MIND CTI's strength in the marketplace, Shain says, is the fact that the company came from the VoIP arena and now supports a full range of solutions—including triple play providers. "Because the triple play is based on IP, it is very easy for us to support multiple IP environments using only one system," he says.

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