BlueOSS' new billing platform sets focus on wholesale cloud opportunities

LAS VEGAS--BlueOSS, a provider of cloud-based billing and analytics tools, has introduced its Wholesaler Pricing and Support Program that will target the emerging wholesale cloud services segment.

Delivered through its Cloud Innovation Suite, the new initiative will give its wholesale customers access to what it says is a fully automated, enterprise-class, (pay-as-you-go) cloud billing platform, pre-configured to integrate and customize catalog and cloud offerings for solutions sold to business customers.

By leveraging a multi-tier inheritable catalog technology, the Wholesaler Pricing and Support Program allows service providers to inherit their catalog into a platform and then select the services they want to bill for on behalf of a specific reseller partner.

"What we said is we have this really robust billing platform so we're going to take this premises-based platform and put it in the cloud and make it available to everybody and change the cost model," said Tim Cook, CEO of Blue OSS, in an interview with FierceTelecom, during the 2014 COMPTEL Spring trade show. "Now, no longer are we in the traditional software license long integration cycle, but now turn it up in 2 minutes, start loading up your catalog and you're ready to go."

One key benefit of this platform is time to market.

Resellers will be able to upload additional wholesale services out of the catalog, which will allow them to access and sell services right away. What's more, a common connection between catalogs will help wholesale providers to better manage the provisioning process, while gaining knowledge about sales analytics and business intelligence.  

Another benefit is billing accuracy. A wholesale provider can be billed only for the items invoiced to its reseller partner, while resellers are not billed for selling items inherited from the wholesale provider in their catalogs.

In addition, BlueOSS provides resellers the opportunity to add their own products to their catalogs, creating white label cloud services that they can then sell via their own custom interface. 

Already, BlueOSS is seeing continual customer momentum by selling its Cloud Innovation Suite to resellers for over a year. By working with SureTax, any taxes are automatically calculated for the service provider. They can also integrate with call detail or data records, whether it's voice minutes or measuring against a 100 Gigabit usage plan and charging different rates for overages.  

What drove BlueOSS to apply its services to the wholesale market are requests from wholesale operators that needed a rapid way to support their reseller partners' movement into the cloud services arena.

"What we have found is that the wholesaler's challenge in getting to market is not their ability, but their reseller's ability to get that product to market in a way in which they can accurately manage and bill for the cloud services that are being used," Cook said. "Most of the resellers don't have that capability because many of them are seeing their premise business going away, but in order to support their customer's move into the cloud, they need to build out a new ecosystem so that's where we seeing this momentum in the wholesale market coming from."

While the wholesale cloud service opportunity is arguably nascent, some service providers like Windstream (Nasdaq: WIN) are starting to step up to the plate with cloud programs for their value added reseller (VAR) channel.

The service provider recently introduced a strategy to help channel partners establish their position in the cloud services segment, for example.

For more:
- see the release

Related articles:
Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei, Juniper maintain carrier router/switch lead, but SDN causes carrier pause
CenturyLink's OSS build sets stage for software-defined networking ecosystem