They're not exactly around the corner, but India-based Condor Infotech offers a highly flexible billing platform to ISPs worldwide.

by Jeff Goldman [November 5, 2001]

Update: May be out of business. We do not have contact information for this company.

There are three divisions in the Condor Group of companies based in Bangalore, India. Condor Labs does systems integration and consulting, CondorOnline is an ISP serving the Bangalore area, and Condor Infotech offers a range of software from database integration to billing. Condor Infotech's billing solutions include Net Billing for ISPs, and Net Billing 900 for telephone billing—both products were released within the last year.

The company was founded in 1998 as a joint venture by a group of telecommunications professionals, with funding from Tri-Tel Communications in New York City. C.V. Srinivasa, Condor's President, CEO, and founder, was the Vice President of Global Markets Technology for Chase Manhattan Bank in New York until he moved back to India to set up Condor.

Net Billing info@condorinfotech.com

Srinivasa explains that he's concentrating on the Western market for Net Billing because of the limited market potential among Indian ISPs. "In India, the ISP was a monopoly of the state until 1999, so there are not too many ISPs in India," he said. "Probably there are 500 people who have taken licenses from the government, of which only 10 percent of them are in production—it's very new. So we are trying to trying to concentrate on the Asian countries, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and the Western world."

Platform independence
One of the key assets of Net Billing is its platform flexibility. According to R. Vijaynidhi, Condor's Vice President of Marketing, that's a unique benefit for any ISP.

"It will work on any platform," Vijaynidhi said. "If you have Linux, if you have an NT machine, if you have a Solaris box, whatever you have, it will work with any kind of OS." According to Vijaynidhi, the solution will also work with any version of RADIUS, as well as any ODBC-enabled database.

Srinivasa says the flexibility was a direct result of the frustrations he experienced while developing the ISP CondorOnline. He was about to purchase a Linux-based billing solution when a member of his team asked to switch to Windows.

"You will have this challenge within any company, and so you keep buying," he said. "That's when we decided we were going to make a platform independent billing solution. You can run it on anything."

Example of user details at a glance.

Still, he says, the best argument for Net Billing is the simplest one. "I'm more of a cost man," Srinivasa said. "When you compare the cost, with all the features—take Extent RBS, for example—for 25,000 or 50,000 users, they want $100,000."

Pricing for Net Billing ranges from $1,200 for a basic package without RADIUS, limited to 1000 users, to $15,600 for a 10,000-user package that includes RADIUS, unlimited email support, a year of free upgrades, and a number of additional modules.

Example of error report.

Implementation is an extremely straightforward process, which Srinivasa says shouldn't take much more than an hour. And if there are any problems, they'll install the software for you for free.

"In Sri Lanka, there was one customer who said the CD we sent was corrupted, so we said, 'Okay, if you are willing to give us access to your server, we'll take care of it,'" Srinivasa said. "He wanted to go into production right away, so the boys got online remotely and installed it."

A tailor-bade solution
Jordell Anderson is the Vice President of International Communications for Lo/Ad Communications, a pay-per-call and audiotext service bureau based in Pasadena, California. The company was founded in 1984, and has expanded continually since then: they've provided services to a number of Fortune 500 companies, including AT&T and Sprint.

Anderson came across Condor Infotech when he was seeking a way to control chargebacks on 900 billing. He discovered that Net Billing 900 had a lot of the answers he was looking for in terms of tracking people who made 900 calls. Condor's programmers made a number of modifications to their product for Lo/Ad, and Anderson says he was impressed with their speed and their skills. "They're a good bunch of guys," he said. "They're very dedicated, and very determined to get the job done."

Although, Anderson did say that the costs for the modifications exceeded initial estimates. He accepts some of the responsibility for that, admitting that he may not have been clear enough about some of the changes he wanted made, but he says that dealing with the escalating costs was a frustrating experience.

"If you were going to have them do some work for you, you would have to be very specific about what you wanted done, and very specific about what it's going to cost," he said.

Still, that hasn't made Anderson seek other another billing solution. He says that Lo/Ad will continue to use more and more aspects of the Net Billing 900 software.

"I think I could have done it cheaper, but we're really not disappointed," he said. "They have a good product out there—what drew me to them in the first place is the Net Billing platform."

— End  

Online resources:
		ISP-Billing Directory

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