SysMaster's billing solution is offered as a pre-integrated appliance with a broad range of functionality.

by Jeff Goldman [June 27, 2007]

SysMaster Corporation was founded in 1998 as a software development company. "In '02, we came out with our flagship VoiceMaster VoIP Billing product, and that set the stage for a rapid business expansion," says company director of marketing Martin Yosifov. "Last year, in '06, we added IPTV and wireless product lines, and that gave us the opportunity to become the first equipment manufacturer that can offer end-to-end, triple-play solutions to our customers."

It's those end-to-end solutions that make SysMaster stand out—unlike many competitors' offerings, the company's products are offered as fully integrated appliances with all software pre-installed. "We've done the software/hardware integration, so our customers can focus on their business rather than on technical challenges," Yosifov says. "Our system runs on Linux in order to be robust, and you can just imagine what kind of technical problems a customer might face when trying to install something on Linux, which is not well supported on any hardware. That's why we decided to package the system."

SysMaster Corporation 370 N. Wiget Lane, Suite 100 Walnut Creek, CA 94598 Tel: (877) 900-3993 Fax: (510) 428-2495 Web contact form

SysMaster's typical customer, Yosifov says, is a small to mid-sized provider. "Our equipment is quite scalable—we can serve providers with several hundred subscribers, and at the same time we can also serve providers with several hundred thousand subscribers," he says, mentioning as an example a recent municipal wireless deployment of IPTV and VoIP services in a city with a population of 250,000. "We're not dealing with providers with a million-plus subscribers, but anything up to that we can definitely offer equipment for," he says.

More than just billing

VoiceMaster ISP Billing

The company's VoiceMaster ISP Billing appliance offers a great deal of flexibility. "Basically, we offer a standard product, and then we offer a number of different functionality upgrades—and we have over 100 different upgrades, so the product can be utilized in a wide range of business environments and applications," Yosifov says. "For example, our customers can start with an ISP billing product, and then they can upgrade to include VoIP billing, as well as IPTV billing if necessary—and they can upgrade the software in order to manage wireless networks as well."

Most of the time, Yosifov says, it's possible to add functionality to the product without adding new hardware. "However, if you want to expand your solution, say, to offer IPTV services, we have to do a server upgrade—and we have to send additional products if necessary, depending on the customer's particular infrastructure," he says.

Still, he notes that the products use industry-standard protocols and interoperate well with a customer's legacy solutions. "For the billing side, we utilize RADIUS, so we can interoperate with any third party that supports standard RADIUS protocols," Yosifov says. "Our system is pretty open—we provide the opportunity to our customers either to use it on a standalone basis, or to purchase an end-to-end solution from us: in no way are we restricting customers which way to go."

At the same time, the core VoiceMaster ISP Billing solution offers a lot of flexibility, covering pre-paid and post-paid billing, as well as time-based, bandwidth-based and flat-fee billing. When integrated with the company's access controller product, it can also do real-time billing and session management. "Different providers have different requirements, so we try to support everything for all of those customers," Yosifov says.

Focused on the triple play
Pricing for the products depends on the amount of functionality desired—it's not based on the number of subscribers. "The ISP billing product starts at about $10,000, and it goes up with the addition of different functionality, in the form of modules and customizations, if necessary," Yosifov says.

Most importantly, Yosifov suggests that an ISP can derive significant savings from the fact that SysMaster's products are delivered as pre-integrated appliances. "We're saving integration costs for our customers—this is a major selling point for our company," he says. "For example, if you purchase separate products from three different manufacturers, you might have to spend a couple or tens of thousands of dollars just to integrate those products. If you decide to purchase those products from us, we have already done the pre-integration in house, so there is no need for extra integration costs."

The larger aim of the company's product line, Yosifov says, is to support the convergence of voice, video, and data services. "We do think that, sooner or later, everybody will try to offer more value to their customers so that they can generate better revenue from those customers, and triple-play services are the way to go," he says. "And we 100 percent support that trend."

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