XACCTusage from XACCT Technologies, Inc. (Usage-based Billing for Internet)
Platforms: Solaris, Windows NT 4.0
Price: starts at $25,000
URL: http://www.Xacct.com

Solution with the intelligence to enable Network Service Providers (NSPs) to accurately bill for IP-based applications. Gives NSPs the ability to develop innovative, flexible pricing models for their IP-based services and generate meaningful bills for their customers.

NSPs typically charge a flat monthly access fee because they have no way to bill for specific services in a meaningful manner. With the XACCT software, NSPs can collect actual IP session data, such as type of application, time of day, Quality of Service (QoS), user identification, and more, and use these to create innovative, flexible pricing models. Now NSPs can quickly develop and offer a broad range of new network services. Users can be provided with bills that itemize the services they are paying for, much like a telephone bill.

The source of XACCTusage's flexibility and power lies in its ability to collect all relevant information about every IP session, from multiple sources, and create accurate and complete billing records. XACCTusage extracts data from routers, switches, and firewalls; from RADIUS, Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) and Proxy/Web servers; and from all layers of the network, from the physical layer to the application layer.

Once it collects the raw transaction data about an IP session, XACCTusage distills and enhances it to produce an accurate billing record, called an XDR or XACCT Detail Record, the IP equivalent of the Call Detail Records (CDRs) generated by telephone switches. Because XACCTusage integrates easily with existing Customer Care and Billing systems (CCBs), NSPs can use the XDRs to generate meaningful customer bills.

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