InfoGears' BriteWire product provides ISPs of all sizes with a complete solution for everything from billing to network monitoring.

by Jeff Goldman [January 19, 2005]

Craig Delger founded InfoGears in 2000, after 14 years in the software industry, working with a wide range of different systems. "I came up with this grand idea that what was really needed was a core business application platform, not all these best-of-breed, turnkey solutions that you then had to try and figure out how to integrate with each other," he says.

Delger's aim was to eliminate the headache of having to log out of one system and into another in order to track data. "We set out, first and foremost, to build a business application platform that we could then put modules on top of, knowing full well that our primary strength was going to be our flexibility and customization," he says.

InfoGears (406) 582-1200 info@infogears.com

The idea behind building a modular structure was to allow ISP clients to pick and choose the functionality they needed. "We knew we weren't going to just force the same solution on everybody," Delger says. "We were going to go into people's businesses and say, 'What are your problems? Let's try and economically solve them with a very flexible, robust platform.'"

That modular flexibility also allows the company to expand gradually into more areas of a client's operations. InfoGears, Delger says, can now handle the entire customer lifecycle for an ISP, from tracking sales leads to order management to customer service to network monitoring. "We do it for very large ISPs as well as very small ISPs," he says.

The platform, Delger says, is also designed to save an ISP a significant amount of money by allowing lower-skilled employees to take care of tasks that might otherwise require more advanced technical skills, from creating e-mail accounts to providing DNS hosting and management.

An ISP platform
InfoGears' packaged ISP solution, covering everything from CRM to network management, is called BriteWire. "Basically, once the customer comes into the billing side of the solution, you can really just set it and forget it," Delger says. "It will pick it all up automatically."

Included with the solution is a customer management system, which provides a single integrated view of each customer. "You pull up the customer record, and within one screen, you can see their whole sales history, any opportunities the customer has, any support issues that customer's ever had, any invoices that customer's ever had, and all their network monitoring and management activity," Delger says.

Pricing for the services was designed to be flexible, Delger says, in order to accommodate the range of ISP sizes that the company services. "For a small customer, it starts off at about two bucks a month, and then with more subscribers we start to scale that down so it represents less per subscriber," he says. That price covers all modules, from project management to billing.

Alternatively, a larger organization can choose to pay per module. "You can start off using just one of our modules if you want, and that would start off at about $150 a month for a single module," Delger says. "Then we charge $50 for each named user account, for each employee that needs to use the system. So when you start adding up all those modules, and you get 30 employees using it, on the high end our customers are paying us many thousands of dollars a month."

Pricing and intuitiveness
Bill MacNamara is Vice President of Business Development at Agility Solutions, and a principal at Canyon Broadband. Agility resells InfoGears to its customers, and Canyon Broadband uses the product itself. The InfoGears management interface, MacNamara says, is one of the product's strongest selling points. "I can see if I'm having any issues anywhere, because it's all Web-based," he says. "And I can track my equipment, my customers, any marketing campaigns I do, to see what kind of results I'm getting on the money I'm spending."

Another strength of the product, MacNamara says, is its intuitiveness. "It grows with you as you educate it," he says. "And it's very easy to format menus to work for you in terms of how you want to see information. It's not cut and dried."

MacNamara adds that InfoGears is priced competitively in comparison to similar products in the marketplace. "It's not a big expense to get on a world-class billing platform," he says. "We do it on a per-subscriber basis, and since it's moduled, you can pick and choose what you want."

And MacNamara says the software has continued to improve steadily. "Since, as we know, most businesses are one or two person ma and pa shops, the last thing you need is to be spending all your time trying to figure out how to bill and monitor your network, and make sure your customers are happy," he says.

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