Rodopi's web-enabled billing, provisioning, and customer care solution is available on both a purchased and a hosted basis.

by Jeff Goldman [August 22, 2007]

Rodopi Software was created in 1998 as the ISP billing software division of Abacus America—and in 2004, Rodopi was spun off as an independent software vendor. Throughout that process, according to company president and CEO Todd Benjamin, the core value proposition of the software hasn't changed: total automation of customer management. "We're trying to automate as many processes as we can, with as little human interaction as possible," he says.

Since 1998, of course, the ISP business has gone through enormous changes—and Benjamin says Rodopi has evolved with its clients to continue to meet their needs. "What we do today is much more broadband-centric, as ISPs have in large part evolved past simple dialup and into DSL, wireless, satellite and other types of broadband access media," he says.

Inevitably, that adds complexity, particularly as ISPs offer VoIP and triple-play services, but Benjamin says Rodopi has remained focused on keeping things simple and customizable. "We've been working diligently to convert the entire offering to a .NET-based system, which gives us quite a bit of flexibility in terms of the kinds of tools that are available for development," he says.

Rodopi (877) 4-RODOPI sales@rodopi.com

Keeping the solution web-enabled, Benjamin says, has been key for Rodopi from the beginning. That not only makes it easier to deploy the solution in any location, but it also makes it possible for people to access it while on the move. "It always has and always will be a web-enabled offering," he says.

Focused on flexibility
The software is available both as a licensed solution, Rodopi OSS, and as a hosted offering called EasyOSS. Traditionally, Benjamin says, larger companies generally choose to purchase the software, while smaller companies and startups will go with the hosted offering—but he also says that's starting to change. "More and more people are exhibiting a willingness to rethink how much of the software they really need to have running in their data center," he says.

And that, of course, fits in well with Rodopi's focus on a web-enabled paradigm. "We're evolving our platform along the lines of web services, opening up and rewriting everything… to make it easier for people to consume portions of the functionality across the internet—and making it easier to integrate it with systems they may already have in house," Benjamin says.

That kind of flexibility, Benjamin says, also extends to Rodopi's reporting functionality. Users can write and publish their own reports—and a new offering, he says, will soon allow users to provide targeted information to specific people, from customers to employees. "We've spent a lot of time and effort on getting our reporting to the right place," he says. "It's one of those things where, no matter how much work you do, you never seem to satisfy everybody—so providing a platform and tools sometimes is the best way to respond to that: empowering people to do what they need to do for their particular business model."

Supporting VoIP
That same flexibility applies to the modular structure of the solution in general, which can support everything from bandwidth management to VoIP. "The other thing we've focused on heavily is integrating with specific target platforms based on relationships that we have in the market, with people like BroadSoft and MetaSwitch and others, who have leading platforms that our customers have expressed a desire to be able to integrate into their service portfolio—and actually coming out with pre-packaged modules to do the provisioning and billing for those services," Benjamin says.

VoIP in particular, Benjamin says, is always more complex than any service provider expects it to be—which makes a complete solution like Rodopi particularly useful. "It's not just about billing a voice service," he says. "You've got the provisioning challenges, especially if you deal with business customers or complex packages—how do you automate that, how do you standardize it?" he says. "And then more and more, especially in this country, being a provider of voice has had an evolving set of requirements with support for E-911, with taxation…and then you've got CALEA as well."

Pricing
Pricing for the solution is structured around a "pay as you grow" model—allowing small providers to start using it with a minimal capital outlay, then add more subscriber licenses as needed. "We see ourselves as the leader in affordable solutions to support the offering of these services," Benjamin says.

It's also easy, he says, to switch from EasyOSS to Rodopi OSS at any time. "A number of our customers will start in a hosted mode, and then as they evolve and grow their business, it may make sense economically—or just because they want to have more control—to migrate that application over to their own servers," he says.

Next on the agenda for Rodopi, Benjamin says, is increased control over end user portals. "We've always offered a customer-facing self-serve portal, but what we're finding is that the whole user interface, and especially the piece that's presented towards the end user, has been a big challenge for everybody," he says. "So in addition to offering an API that allows the ISP to develop their own user interface or connect their existing user interface to Rodopi, we're also spending a lot of time in making that as easy as possible. And we'll be coming out with some products in the fall that support getting the customer portals developed and customized very quickly without a large investment."

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