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A layer of billing providers zeroing in on broadband content are inching closer and closer to a financial windfall. How to manage, track and charge for the Internet's greatest future asset are the issues being tackled by a growing number of providers.
Analysts already have pointed to several technological issues to watch for during the evolution of content billing products. Among them will be which products will have the ability to process billions of daily content transactions and which will be able to monitor account activity while offering different pricing models. Content providers, ISPs and ASPs anxiously are awaiting the advancements. They all are looking for ways to effectively handle the customer demand for content delivery in real-time.
"I think there's going to be a lot of investment in customer care companies, especially now that other dot-coms have fallen on hard times," says Jason Briggs, a senior billing analyst for The Yankee Group. "We've been hearing a lot of buzz from the VC community."
Some companies are quickly moving to the forefront in the content billing space. After completing its mega-merger last month, AOL Time Warner became the most powerful content brand in the industry. Which is why the billing sector's darling, Portal Software, lit up the newswires last month by signing a contract with AOL Time Warner in a deal that was viewed by many as a landmark.
"This was pretty significant for Portal. A lot of their competitors have questioned their scalability in the past," said Lisa Cebollero, a billing analyst for The Yankee Group. "This gives them a chance to show off, and say that if we can scale to handle AOL, we can scale for anybody."
Late last year Portal took a leadership role in content billing by partnering with Inktomi, Redback Networks and Sun Microsystems to create a broadband service delivery platform for the digital content market that features Portal's Infranet billing product. In an effort to "monetize" such services as video-on-demand and live streaming media, Infranet offers service providers several pricing models, including value-based, subscription-based, usage-based or quality-of-service-based billing plans.
"Portal has been working for a number of years with companies in the content space," said Sanjay Swamy, Portal's senior director of market development, pointing to Portal's customer relationship with media company Reuters. "While it's a market that's picking up momentum, it's a market that we've been in for quite some time now."
A host of other emerging providers are joining Portal as the early movers in broadband content billing. New Jersey-based Apogee Networks utilized the success of its NetCountant billing product to secure an equity investment from Cisco Systems in January, and it has become a popular early success story among analysts.
Active in the content billing game since 1998, Apogee Networks' business model currently pursues two principle markets. The NetCountant Accountability solution is deployed to a customer's IT department and allows it to define, monitor and rate all data usage on its Intranet by departments, subsidiaries and partners. On Feb. 6, British Telecommunications signed on as the first high-profile carrier partner to use NetCountant Accountability.
Another of Apogee Networks' flagship products, the NetCountant Content Collection, will be one of the company's key building blocks for its ability to define, aggregate and report billions of IP records. Early customers of NetCountant include Cisco, Nortel Networks and CacheFlow.
"It's caught the excitement of everyone," said Andrew Burroughs, the chief marketing officer at Apogee Networks. "It's content-aware technology. It's an important technology, because content will have such value. It will be such an asset."
According to Burroughs, Apogee Networks also plans on expanding into wireless content billing. Briggs said other early-movers in the broadband content billing space to watch over the next two years will be Geneva, Solect and Danish company Digiquant.
Some of the more entrenched billing providers likely won't be sitting still, either. Convergys Corp. recently inked deals with AT&T Broadband to provide services on its Integrated Communications Operations Management System for AT&T residential and commercial cable telephony subscribers.
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