Smile is designed to provide everything you need to bill efficiently from a single, reliable, modular platform.

by Jeff Goldman [April 18, 2007]

Inomial was founded in Sydney, Australia in 1998—according to company director Mark Lillywhite, Inomial's first customer went live in February 1999. In late 2000, the company moved its headquarters to Melbourne, and in 2004, Inomial's original Java application, iCMS, was replaced with a fully web-based billing solution called Smile.

When Inomial began its initial development work in 1998, Lillywhite says, "I felt that there were not really any packages—at least not in Australia—that were built on good engineering fundamentals. Those that seemed promising were missing features that I considered important. But most of the packages were really just collections of scripts, which I knew from experience were hard to maintain and difficult to upgrade."

Inomial's Smile (03) 9663-3554 sales@inomial.com

More importantly, Lillywhite says, there just weren't that many dedicated ISP solutions available at the time. "Since I had operated a regional ISP in the mid '90s, I felt that there was an opportunity to apply my experience in both domains—internet billing and software engineering," he says.

A web-based solution
Smile's key strengths, Lillywhite says, are all about the billing. "Although we provide an excellent built-in RADIUS server, and although we provide a great development environment, the main reason people go with us is because we can turn the billing around really quickly, we have good financial reporting, our billing and receivables system is very robust and mature," he says.

Lillywhite says ease of use and ease of deployment are also key selling points. "Accessing Smile is easy because it is 100 percent web-based—so there is no Citrix or other GUI technology involved—which may seem obvious, but we have been surprised at how many 'internet-accessible' solutions are actually based on Windows GUI and Citrix," he says.

For Smile, Lillywhite says, that means the solution can be used anywhere you can access a browser—and everything from rules to invoice layouts can be configured online with no programming skills. "This is really important when you have call centers, or staff who work from home, but it also means that you can deploy the technology without having to deal with client operating systems," he says.

A full feature set
Another strength, Lillywhite says, is that there's only one product to buy. "Smile comes with everything enabled," he says. "You don't have to buy a data service and a voice service and a connection to a database and a user interface and a customer portal and an e-mail connector just to make it work. There are no per-seat licenses, and the account limits are generous."

And within that one product, he says, there's a wide range of functionality, including the ability to bill for everything from data to voice to electricity. "We do everything from online credit card processing (with automatic retries, e-mail notification of declined transfers, etc.) to advanced billing with pro-rata charging and plan change schedules," he says.

It's also easy to add more functionality as needed, using a proprietary platform the company calls Tang. "The benefit of Tang is that it lets our customers create their own modules and applications which can be added to Smile or to our end-user portal," Lillywhite says. "If our customer can't develop the code themselves, then it is easy and quick for us to do so."

Accurate and efficient
Ultimately, though, nothing matters more than accurate and efficient billing. "We support multiple billing cycles in the same database, and we can deal with recurring charges from daily to annual and beyond," Lillywhite says. "We also include prepaid time and voucher generation facilities. So there are a number of ways to sell your product, and we will accurately bill for it and we will make sure it gets paid for."

In terms of efficiency, Lillywhite says, the aim is to automate as much as possible, and to make it easy to turn the billing around quickly. "From the end of the billable period to the production of PDFs or e-mails and the submission of reports to your finance department, we aim to let you do this in one business day," he says.

And customers are empowered to handle their own issues. "Our customer portal is very powerful and allows the presentation of multiple options to an end user based on the services that the user has subscribed to," Lillywhite says. "So for example, a customer with a VoIP service and a DSL service will see options related to both, and be able to manage them both separately, without a large administrative overhead."

Pricing…and version 4.0
Pricing starts with a licensing fee plus an additional charge per 5,000 accounts—currently AU$9,000 (approx. US$7,350) for the first 5,000 accounts and AU$5,000 (approx. US$1,000) for each additional block of 5,000. "Support is based on the same model—so for a given number of accounts, say, 20,000, you know exactly how much it will cost to use our software," Lillywhite says.

Smile 3.0 was released in February of 2006, and Smile 4.0 is currently in beta with a final release expected imminently. Key improvements in 4.0, Lillywhite says, include a new credit card processing system, a new document management system, an improved user interface, and a major update to Smile's voice billing capabilities.

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