Digiquant's IMS platform allows larger ISPs to expand their range of services quickly and easily, without affecting the stability of their core offering.

by Jeff Goldman [December 10, 2001]

Digiquant was founded in 1992 as Belle Systems by Hasse Rasmussen and Niels Ralund. In 1994, the company released the first version of its Internet Management System, or IMS, a modular platform covering everything from deployment and authentication to billing and customer care.

The company now boasts more than 70 customers worldwide, including broadband and dialup ISPs, wireless providers, infrastructure providers, ASPs, and content providers. Digiquant has offices in 14 countries, with a product development center in Copenhagen and regional headquarters in Atlanta, Frankfurt, and Singapore.

According to Rosemary Mount, Digiquant's Director of Global Marketing, a key asset of IMS is the fact that it allows an ISP to run a number of different services from a single installation. "They can deliver a whole host of IP services from a single infrastructure platform," she said. "They don't have to build something new every time they want to launch a new service. It gives them ultimate flexibility, and it really shortens the time to market for new services."

Digiquant (770) 206-4600

Easy to expand
IMS runs on Solaris or HP-UX, and uses Oracle as a database. The system runs in real time, allowing for both prepaid and postpaid billing, and supports virtually any combination of fee structures imaginable. Because Digiquant has extensive experience with a range of international customers, it's been developed to support just about every currency in existence, including the Euro. (IMS Organization Below.)

The system uses open APIs to integrate with third-party products for everything from credit card billing to customer relationship management. Mount notes that the APIs also make it easier to integrate new offerings with legacy systems. "It's perfect for a Tier 1 provider that wants to start taking advantage of offering IP services, bundled with some of its more traditional services," she said.

Morten Seifert, Digiquant's Global Product Manager, explains that IMS's modular architecture makes it easy for an ISP to expand its services. "All the base features you need are supported by the platform, but it's service-unaware," Seifert said. "Then on top of this base platform, we can build a Voice over IP (VoIP) module, a Virtual Private Network (VPN) module, and so forth. It gives us the flexibility to react more rapidly to changes in the market."

What this also means, Seifert explains, is that it's much easier to make adjustments to one aspect of an ISP's offering without worrying about the effect those changes might have on the rest of the platform (IMS Configuration Example Right). "It lessens the complexity of the product," he said. "You have all these independent modules, so if you change something in your dial module, you just have to test your dial module. Otherwise, you would have to test the whole system to make sure that you didn't alter anything else."

IMS is targeted at larger ISPs—Seifert says that most of Digiquant's ISP customers have over a million subscribers, though some do have less. Users pay a base license fee for the IMS product, as well as additional fees for each module or service deployed: for an ISP, the fee is based on the number of active subscribers. In addition, a maintenance fee, about 20 percent of the customer's license fees, covers around the clock support and all upgrades.

According to Seifert, implementation is comparatively simple, allowing ISPs to deploy the solution in anywhere from one to three months. "It's very quick to implement," he said. "The IMS installation itself you can do within days. The part that takes the most time is making sure you configure all the things around IMS-but installation and initial configuration of the system is very rapid, compared to a lot of other systems."

Quick on the draw
A great example of this rapid implementation is Electric Lightwave, a leading integrated communications provider offering a wide range of voice and data services, with a focus on the western United States. In August of this year, ELI expanded its Remote System Virtual Portal dialup service (RSVP) nationwide.

According to Geoff Williams, the company's Data Network Architect, the expansion beyond ELI's own physical network forced him to find a way of integrating with third-party vendors at the last minute. "We realized with only a few months to spare that we didn't have a solution that would enable us to scale and expand the footprint of RSVP nationally," Williams said.

With just about three months to go, Williams and his team began considering a number of different solutions. In early June, they checked out Digiquant's IMS offering. "Every time we brought up an issue that other vendors had hemmed and hawed about, the people at Digiquant said, 'We can do that,'" he said. "They had the right answers to all our questions, so we quickly made the decision to go with them." (Services Offered Left.)

The implementation took just a few weeks, allowing Williams to get the service up and running with time to spare. "The combination of IMS' functionality and the quick implementation was exactly what the doctor ordered," he said. "We would have lost a lot of potential new RSVP service revenues without Digiquant's help. Every step of the way, they told us what they were going to do, and in each case they did it - on time and on budget."

Adam Schrage, ELI's Vice President of Marketing, adds that IMS has also permitted the company to become more flexible with its services. "With the IMS platform, we provide additional value to our business customers by providing more flexible billing options for our RSVP service," he said. "For example, we can now offer our customers a variety of billing options, by port, by user, and soon, by minute."

And that, Mount explains, is what IMS is all about. "It's not just dialup," she said. "It's about doing service bundles, doing some really good, and interesting things. And we're an integral part of their being able to do that."

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Online resources:
		ISP-Billing Directory
		Billing Service Quick Reference Chart

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