MetraTech Corp., the leading provider of agreements-based billing™, commerce and settlement solutions, today announced the delivery of MetraNet® 7.1, which builds on MetraTech’s ability to empower businesses to easily and fluidly monetise all relationships with customers, partners and suppliers. MetraNet 7.1 gives global businesses the scalability, performance, billing and partner-settlement capabilities they need to monetise everything-as-a-service (XaaS), as well as the means to negotiate and support global enterprise agreements while providing personalisation on a regional or local level.

"The right billing system enables us to support increasingly complex and varied products and services. In MetraTech, we found a partner that meets our needs, both immediately and into the future," said Francisco Carlos Gomez, chief financial officer of Cetip, Latin America’s largest depositary and clearinghouse for securities.

Businesses today need to build differentiated and sticky relationships with their customers and partners to create customers for life. This requires an enterprise-class billing platform that can provide billing and settlement for all services, including subscriptions, usage-based services, negotiated business-to-business agreements, multi-sided business models, and cross-product discounting and bundling. MetraNet 7.1 helps enterprises adapt their business models at scale to support XaaS by providing:

  • Flexible pricing, billing and invoicing for the entire service portfolio: Subscription and usage-based pricing models are underpinned by a proven enterprise-grade rating and pricing engine.
  • Value-added services and partner settlement: Value-added service offerings translate to new revenue opportunities. Irrespective of where the service comes from or which partners are involved, the customer experience needs to be maintained and the revenue due the partner must be calculated and billed accurately.
  • A 360-degree customer view for product, sales and finance: Customer data and service consumption by department, region and aggregated corporate view can be analysed in real-time and continuously adjusted and acted on with dynamic pricing and personalised offerings that drive long-term customer relationships and unlock upselling opportunities.
  • "Glocal" empowerment for sales and operations teams: Businesses can negotiate and monetise global agreements that also reflect regional business requirements for service personalisation and compliance. Being able to measure, monitor and report in real-time on the right metrics for all lines of business ensures timely decision-making.
  • A scalable and manageable services-based product catalog: The volume and complexity of services as a result of XaaS demands a scalable, services-based catalog that does not require every option to have a unique stock-keeping unit (SKU) or identifier. One-off service variants need to be handled flexibly and easily.

"Very few suppliers can deliver the same level of billing and partner settlement options to its customers as MetraTech with its agreements-based billing™ platform," said Karl Whitelock, director of global OSS/BSS strategy at Stratecast | Frost & Sullivan. "MetraTech will continue to grow strongly as the global community realises the capabilities that the company offers. While competitors will attempt to follow its lead, MetraTech’s technical innovations will be difficult to duplicate."

With global capabilities and local personalisation, MetraNet 7.1 supports a "glocal" approach to billing and settlement, with features including:

  • Hierarchical rate inheritance to simplify subscription management in business hierarchies and reduce data entry
  • Advanced quoting for global agreements, including support for individual quotations, full taxation and group subscriptions
  • Simplicity and automation through a new wizard-based user interface that brings the power of MetraNet’s Real-time Commerce Decision Engine™ to the business user. All billing events are able to be qualified and aggregated by an unlimited number of account or usage criteria and processed against configurable and comprehensive rules for action
  • Superior system reliability and resiliency through an automated reconciliation process for the Real-time Commerce Decision Engine to continuously audit, validate and reconcile the usage processing to ensure that no event ever gets lost, even in the event of system failure
  • Out-of-the-box (OOTB) tax integration with Vertex® Communications Tax Q SeriesTM 2.02 corporate tax solution to support multi-state communications taxes for a multitude of telecom and cable services in thousands of taxing jurisdictions
  • OOTB tax inclusive support to meet tax requirements in several countries;
  • Robust and scalable quote-to-cash for end-to-end rating, charging, pricing and invoicing with integrations to CRM, advanced quoting OOTB, accounts receivables OOTB through MetraAR™ and hundreds of proven integrations to leading financial applications
  • Transportation industry blueprints to streamline billing and settlement of agreements and partnerships for aviation, concessions and cargo billing models, without any time-consuming or costly integrations for transportation customers, which include Chicago O’Hare International Airport and Guarulhos (GRU) São Paulo International Airport. MetraNet is billing for 16% of the City of Chicago’s revenues at O’Hare and supports aviation, concession and cargo lines of business at GRU after being implement at the airport in just nine weeks from contract signing to deployment.

Esmeralda Swartz, chief marketing officer at MetraTech, said: "We see the number and complexity of services exploding as a result of XaaS trends, requiring a proven enterprise-grade billing and settlement platform purposefully built to take advantage of the opportunity. The MetraNet 7.1 release enhances our customers’ ability to use the MetraNet platform as a competitive business transformation tool. MetraNet minimises the risk and impact of change by enabling businesses to adapt and not compromise due to limitations in their billing system, and their ability to do so becomes a competitive advantage."