Tuesday June 22, 8:05 am Eastern Time
Company Press Release
SOURCE: Kenan Systems
Lucent's Kenan Systems Announces FirstWorld Sale,
New Product Capabilities and Successful BILLDATS Integration
BOSTON, June 22 /PRNewswire/ -- Lucent Technologies' (NYSE: LU - news) Kenan Systems today announced a contract
with FirstWorld Communications; new product capabilities for global customers; and the successful integration and upgrade of
Lucent's BILLDATS® call record management product.
''These announcements show the tremendous momentum we've generated since combining Lucent and Kenan Systems,'' said
Bob Kiburz, Senior Vice President Operations, of Kenan Systems. ''We're winning new customers even as we bring current
customers new competitive capabilities. Our rapid integration and enhancement of BILLDATS shows how quickly we can
create overall billing, order management and analysis solutions that are much greater than the sum of their parts.''
Under Kenan Systems' agreement with Denver-based FirstWorld, Kenan will provide its Arbor®/Wireline advanced billing
and order management solution to support a full range of integrated Internet offerings, as well as data and voice
communications services. This sale complements the recent FirstWorld purchase of the Lucent PathStar(TM) Access Server.
Kenan Systems Arbor/Wireline will provide the billing and order management support for bundled services and the PathStar
Access Server will provide the provisioning. The two products combined will offer an end-to-end solution for IP services.
New Functionality of Arbor/BP
Many of Kenan Systems' enhancements to its Arbor/BP product further support the needs of international service providers.
New capabilities for wireless and wireline carriers worldwide include support for different payment plans, installment and
refinancing plans, and support for country-specific billing and rating regulations. Many of these enhancements will be especially
beneficial to Kenan Systems' growing list of Latin American customers. The product can also now handle a number of new
country-specific tax requirements.
Additionally, Kenan Systems' new capabilities include double-byte character support for the languages used in North Asia.
Carriers can now use Arbor/BP to display bills and customer account information in Korean and in English. Other double-byte
languages to better serve countries in this region are currently in development.
With the Arbor/BP product, carriers can now process bills in the regional unit of currency and accept payments in other
currencies, including the Euro. The enhanced product handles currency conversions and accounting adjustments, as well as
manages the round-off errors as conversions are made back and forth. One customer taking advantage of Kenan Systems' new
multi-currency capabilities is AT&T-Unisource Communications Services v.o.f., a pan-European provider of corporate
telecommunications services. As announced earlier, the Arbor/BP software will support corporate hierarchies for
AT&T-Unisource's customers with the flexibility to establish pricing with the central office in one currency and then send
invoices to any number of local offices in the local currency and language.
Kenan Systems' new wholesale billing functionality, now being used by a number of customers in Europe, is important for
companies that provide services to other national service providers/networks. The traditional retail capabilities of Arbor/BP can
now be used for wholesale accounts as well. Streamlined usage handling enables Arbor/BP to invoice resellers and other large
business accounts quickly. Additionally, Arbor/BP permits a wholesaler to offer support to resellers and service providers in
billing and managing their own end-user accounts.
Successful Product Integration with BILLDATS Data Manager
Kenan Systems' successful integration of Lucent's BILLDATS product for collection, mediation and distribution of call records
will be issued as version 6.0 of the BILLDATS software as part of the overall Kenan Systems portfolio. Kenan Systems'
BILLDATS now offers improved time-to-market advantages with near real-time capabilities and ability to be deployed rapidly,
due to integration with Kenan Systems' products and its support for single- or multi-service providers. BILLDATS is available
initially with the Arbor/Wireline and Arbor/Mobile solutions for billing, customer care, order management and customer
analysis. The BILLDATS 6.0 product handles data from major switch vendors around the world.
Specific product enhancements include near real-time processing of usage data and the ability to incorporate external tables,
such as those from billing and customer care systems, to serve as sources of criteria for filtering and formatting records. This
can eliminate the need to maintain multiple sources of information and increase processing speed. New Specialized Processing
Module (SPM) options include the Validation and Edit SPMs. These modules provide the ability to validate collected call detail
records based on user-specified criteria -- and to manually edit any records that fail the validation criteria. These features are
powerful tools for intercepting potential problems early in the billing process and correcting them.
''To get to where we are in less than three months is pretty remarkable,'' said Kiburz, commenting on the merging of Kenan
Systems with Lucent. ''We've continued to demonstrate our strengths and with the added resources of Lucent Technologies,
we can only get stronger.''
Kenan Systems
Kenan Systems, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lucent Technologies, is an award-winning provider of software products and
services that answer the specific billing, customer care, order management and decision-support requirements of leading single-
and multi-service carriers in the communications industry world-wide, including mobile and wireline voice and data services,
broadband and Internet services. Kenan Systems is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts with offices throughout North
America, Europe and Asia-Pacific. Its more than 100 customers include @Home Network, AT&T, BellSouth International,
British Telecom, Casema, Cegetel, France Telecom, GTE, Level 3, MCI WorldCom, Optus, PageNet, Time Telekom and
Videotron. Additional information on Kenan Systems' business alliances, products and services may be obtained by visiting
kenan.com or via e-mail at info@kenan.com.
Lucent Technologies
Lucent Technologies, headquartered in Murray Hill, New Jersey, designs, builds and delivers a wide range of public and
private networks, communications systems and software, data networking systems, business telephone systems and
microelectronics components. Bell Labs is the research and development arm for the company. Additional information about
Lucent Technologies is available on the company's Web site at lucent.com .
Arbor, the Kenan logo, and the Lucent logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of Kenan Systems Corporation or
Lucent Technologies in the United States and other countries. All other product and brand names are the service marks,
trademarks, registered trademarks, or registered service marks of their respective owners. All rights reserved.
SOURCE: Kenan Systems |
