XACCT Technologies Enables Usage-based Billing for Internet; NSPs Can Now 'Right-Price' IP-BasedApplications
September 22, 1998
SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE) via NewsEdge
Corporation -- XACCT Technologies today announced the first
solution with the intelligence to enable Network Service
Providers (NSPs) to accurately bill for IP-based applications.
The exploding use of applications such as email, Internet
telephony, videoconferencing and virtual private networks
(VPNs) is straining the ability of NSPs to price and bill for their
services appropriately. The XACCTusage(tm) solution gives
NSPs the ability to develop innovative, flexible pricing models
for their IP-based services and generate meaningful bills for
their customers.
"'Time online' alone is no longer sufficient to bill for data
services, " said Anil Uberoi, vice president of marketing at
XACCT. "Service providers need to accurately and profitably
bill for value-added services such as IP telephony, video and
content. XACCTusage allows the service providers to elevate
the enabling technologies into differentiated billable services."
Telephone companies have long prospered by using the vast
quantity of information they collect from their networks to
create and tariff -- a wide variety of services. Although data
networks generate equally vast amounts of information about
IP sessions, much of this information until now has not been
available in a usable format. This situation has limited the
NSPs' profitability and ability to create new services.
NSPs typically charge a flat monthly access fee because they
have no way to bill for specific services in a meaningful
manner. With the XACCT software, NSPs can collect actual IP
session data, such as type of application, time of day, Quality
of Service (QoS), user identification, and more, and use these
to create innovative, flexible pricing models. Now NSPs can
quickly develop and offer a broad range of new network
services. Users can be provided with bills that itemize the
services they are paying for, much like a telephone bill.
"We haven't found anything on the market that can match the
breadth and functionality of XACCTusage," said Charles
Arsenault, system administrator for Teleglobe International, an
intercontinental telecommunications company offering carriers,
businesses and consumers voice, data, Internet, broadcast,
and information services.
"For the first time, we really have a handle on how our
customers are using the network and can bill them
appropriately. We know how much bandwidth they're
consuming, what applications they're using, how long they're
on the network, and much more. We expect our use of
XACCT's software to have a positive effect on our bottom
line."
"Before we installed XACCTusage, we had no way of
determining the level of data network traffic generated by the
various IP services we support," said Matt McClung, system
administrator for Intermountain Health Care, Utah's largest
health and medical services provider.
"Now, we can calculate what resources are being used for
FTP, email, Web, Telnet, and then do capacity planning based
on the information so we can use our resources more
effectively. The ability to import the data from XACCTusage
into easy to read management reports has clarified our
understanding of network usage; we know who is using what
services and how much those services cost. "
A Multi-source, Multi-layer Approach
The source of XACCTusage's flexibility and power lies in its
ability to collect all relevant information about every IP
session, from multiple sources, and create accurate and
complete billing records. XACCTusage extracts data from
routers, switches, and firewalls; from RADIUS, Lightweight
Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) and Proxy/Web servers; and
from all layers of the network, from the physical layer to the
application layer.
Because the impact of different applications and services on
the network varies, this multi-layered approach enables
network operators to accurately assess the costs associated
with services.
Once it collects the raw transaction data about an IP session,
XACCTusage distills and enhances it to produce an accurate
billing record, called an XDR(tm) or XACCT Detail Record, the
IP equivalent of the Call Detail Records (CDRs) generated by
telephone switches. Because XACCTusage integrates easily
with existing Customer Care and Billing systems (CCBs), NSPs
can use the XDRs to generate meaningful customer bills.
"We recently surveyed ISPs to find out what they want in an
IP billing system," said Greg Howard, director of Service
Provider Programs at Infonetics Research (San Jose, Calif.).
"They said they wanted a system that is flexible, accurate,
compatible with their existing equipment, and fully automated.
XACCTusage is an exciting product that hits the ISP market
with what it needs, giving ISPs the capability to quickly
account and bill for advanced new services."
"Business customers are willing to pay more for value-added
services, but only if NSPs can prove their value," said Yankee
Group senior analyst, Boyd Peterson. "That means NSPs need
to price services based not just on cost, but on meaningful,
measurable usage parameters.
"This is exactly what XACCTusage offers. By metering network
usage, right down to individual sessions or transactions, the
software gives NSPs unprecedented insight into how their
network resources are used. This insight empowers them to
track and bill for current and new differentiated services,
profitably."
Automated Service Provisioning
In essence, XACCT's software mediates between the IP
infrastructure and the Customer Care and Billing (CCB) system.
Thus, in addition to providing billable data derived from the
network infrastructure to the CCB system, XACCTusage also
enables the CCB to communicate with the infrastructure.
NSPs can therefore automate service provisioning by using
XACCTusage to pass service activation, authentication, and
authorization information between the customer management
system and the network elements. This enables service
providers to maintain a single interface for the Customer
Service organization as well as reduce their service activation
lead-times.
Creating New Network Services
XACCTusage gives NSPs previously unavailable information
about their services by precisely tracking billable parameters
such as the QoS requested versus actually delivered, latency,
distance-based applications, and more.
With XACCTusage, NSPs can create -- and bill for -- a broad range
of services:
-- NSPs can charge different rates for applications -- such as Voice
over IP, IP fax, video, and broadcast or "push" technologies --
that make significantly different demands on the network.
-- NSPs can now charge different rates for Web proxy and direct Web
traffic.
-- NSPs can bill appropriately for Internet telephony, including
H.323 calls and proprietary IP calls.
-- NSPs can now influence customer usage patterns by charging a
premium for prime-time usage and lower rates for off-peak hours
for better load balancing.
-- For high-bandwidth applications such as videoconferencing or
large FTP transfers, XACCTusage can capture latency and
end-to-end bandwidth actually delivered.
-- NSPs can cross-market/cross-discount services they want to
promote.
Carrier-Class Architecture
XACCTusage has a highly distributed architecture that
provides maximum configuration flexibility, complete
compatibility with multiple network information sources,
smooth integration with the existing network and billing
infrastructure, easy upgrades, and network expansion without
costly reconfigurations. Customers can install the software
and upgrade on-the-fly, without disrupting any network
activity or network element.
The system consists of five components:
-- Information Source Modules (ISM) are installed either on
non-dedicated hosts in close proximity to network devices such as
routers and switches or directly on application servers as
background processes. In many cases the ISM and the Gatherer can
be installed on the same system. Many different ISMs, each
designed for a specific type of network device, are available,
enabling the user to collect information from virtually any
network element or node.
-- Gatherers are multi-threaded smart agents that run on
non-dedicated hosts as background processes. They collect and
aggregate network session data from multiple ISMs. A single
Gatherer running on a Pentium/NT or SPARC/Solaris system can
collect and process several million IP session records per day.
To prevent this data from overwhelming the network, distributed,
real-time, policy-based data filtering and aggregation schemes
extract only user-specified billable records for further
processing. Gatherers also enhance IP session data with
information collected from other sources, such as RADIUS, DHCP,
LDAP and Domain Name servers, to generate complete, meaningful
billing records.
-- The Central Event Manager (CEM) collects billing records from all
the Gatherers in the system, merges and purges duplicate records
if necessary, and stores XDRs in the XACCT Central Database or
feeds them directly to the billing system. The CEM does database
clean-up, maintenance and recovery and also centrally manages
system-wide upgrade, licensing, and data security.
-- The Central Database stores billing records generated by the
XACCT system and is fully compatible with all popular relational
databases.
-- The User Interface Server provides remote and local access to and
control of the XACCT system via any Java-enabled Web browser.
System Specifications
XACCTusage is a platform-independent solution. Currently, it is
available on Sun SPARC platforms running Solaris 2.51 and
later, as well as on Intel Pentium platforms running Microsoft
Windows NT 4.0 and later.
The software is available bundled with a choice of database
systems, such as Oracle 7.3, Microsoft SQL Server 6.5, and
Sybase SQL Anywhere 5.0. The XACCT User Interface is
accessible from Win32 platforms (Microsoft Windows 95 and
Microsoft Windows NT) through Java-enable Netscape
Navigator 3.01/later or through Java-enabled Microsoft
Internet Explorer 3.02/later.
Pricing and Availability
XACCTusage is available now. Base system price starts at US
$25,000. Total system cost will vary depending on the
network configuration.
About XACCT Technologies
XACCT Technologies, Inc., founded in M |
