BluLogix

Revolutionizing Monetization

Move Beyond Billing Software & Drive Growth with B2B Monetization

Laying a Foundation for Cisco Flex Plan Collaboration

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Capital expenditure models are shifting to operating expenditure models for information technology solutions. In response to this shift, Cisco Partners are focusing on building and managing annuity revenues for their organizations.  Selling Cisco’s Flex Plan Collaboration is a significant step toward delivering on the goal of building a business model where both customers and partners benefit from a consumption pricing model.

Another step for Cisco Partners, moving in this direction, is the ability to combine and bundle their Flex Plan offers with other offers.  These offers include managed services or telecommunications network connectivity, like SIP and SD-WAN.

Bundling multiple services into a single offer creates additional value that translates into additional revenue and margins for the Partner.  Doing so, however, creates operational challenges with quoting, ordering and billing, or what BluLogix calls “Monetization”.

When delivering a quote to the customer, the expectation is that all relevant products and services will be on a single quote.  The ability to combine multiple services from multiple service providers, on a single quote, often requires a solution for pricing and quoting outside of the service provider portal.

A quote should be easily converted to an order.  The act of converting a quote to an order should trigger a set of automated and manual tasks ultimately leading to provisioning or fulfillment of the order.  Tasks are be pre-defined based on the product ordered.  They often require some dependency to take an order from a pending status to an active status.  BluLogix calls this “Process Automation and Orchestration”.  Once an order is fulfilled and active it is in a proper state for billing.

BluLogix recommends service provider delivered services, like Cisco Flex Plan, use a “rebilling” process.  Rebilling is the ability to take the Cisco Flex Plan invoice, read it electronically, adjust the price, and generate an invoice to the customer in the exact same format.

Collaboration solutions often require multiple services from multiple service providers.  In this case invoice data for rebilling must be mediated into a single record.  Pricing is applied to the invoice as if it were a single transaction.  For example:  A Webex Calling Flex Plan charge combined with a DID, Usages (international & toll free) and a hardware as a service fee.

Billing for partner driven charges is enabled from a separate service catalog.  These charges are delivered on the same invoice and managed by the partner.  This catalog includes additional products and services that are both recurring, like managed services, and non-recurring or one-time charges like hardware or implementation fees.

There is significant operational value to the “Monetization” process defined above.  BluLogix customers demonstrate a 75% reduction in resource utilization with BluLogix quote to cash process.  “Rebilling” alone eliminates the almost impossible task of replicating the billing logic from multiple service providers.  It also eliminates the need to reconcile what you are billing your customers versus what you are getting billed for from the service provider.  Additionally, the ability to store costs and revenue with each transaction enables accurate profit analysis at the customer, product and service provider levels.

As Cisco Partners begin to build their businesses around the annuity-based Cisco Flex Plan offers it is important to lay the proper foundation to scale operations as business accelerates.  At BluLogix we often work with Partners who developed a process over time using a combination of existing systems and spreadsheets.  While this may work temporarily, undoing this process creates a significant change management challenge.  The fact that these processes are often spread across multiple stakeholders (sales, finance, operations, IT) reduces the chances of success for the change management process that must occur for partners to scale.

BluLogix recommends a discovery process driven by one of our analysts to define a single repeatable process for every service being offered by every service provider the partner is representing.  Cisco Flex Plan Collaboration is the perfect place to start in laying your foundation for future annuity revenues.

Please Stop Buying “Billing” Software

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You Probably Don’t Need Billing Software

Ok, that’s a statement you probably didn’t expect to read in a blog post from the CEO of BluLogix.  But I am serious. There is a two-fold problem that’s creating a widespread disconnect in the billing software and “subscription management” market. First, organizations identify revenue-related issues in their business and generically label their need as a “billing problem.” Second, software vendors looking to generate sales – understandably so –  focus their marketing and sales efforts on curing these “billing problems.

Unfortunately, this go-to-market approach means ignoring the broader organizational issues causing the perceived billing challenges.  As a result, we are observing an increasing disconnect between the solutions that organizations genuinely need and the software alternatives currently in the market  – resulting in misunderstanding, frustration, and wasted resources.

After interacting with hundreds of prospects and clients, it’s my conclusion that this disconnect and misunderstanding in the billing software market comes down to a single issue – data. In almost every case, billing problems are symptoms of a larger, structural environment of data disaggregation within the organization. Only solving the transactional symptoms of the problem by using traditional billing software ultimately highlights the more subtle symptoms of revenue-related data disaggregation:

These symptoms include:

  • Inability to automate the quote-to-order processes, order-to -provisioning processes and service activation management.
  • Lack of 360 customer visibility across the lifecycle –  order status, contract renewals, account balance, active services, service details, etc.
  • Revenue leakage due to an inability to reconcile costs against revenue.
  • Lack of integration with other essential enterprise systems like CRM and ERP. accounting, or external service providers
  • A need to fully automate the invoicing process and accommodate unique business process needs

Most traditional billing software companies focus on alleviating transactional challenges – the last symptom listed above – because that is what they were architected to achieve. Yes, organizations will save time and increase efficiency by automating their invoicing process. However, gains in transactional efficiency will be offset by the fact that yet another platform now needs to be managed and an additional data silo exists.  In short, the underlying data problem has been exacerbated – not solved.

So what’s the solution to this fundamental disconnect?

At BluLogix we have architected – BLUIQ – our data-enriched monetization platform to address “billing problems” differently. We start outside the realm of software and technical solutions, using our MIND Methodology to conduct an in-depth discovery process before we engage with a client to solve their billing challenges. It’s been our observation that most organizations have quote-to-cash related data residing in at least five internal silos and 2 to 5 times that amount of data coming from external sources like vendor partners.

Therefore, our solution approach goes beyond delivering just billing software to aggregate disparate data sources into a single system of record, create the starting point for delivering “data-enriched monetization,” and address all the symptoms described above, including transactional billing requirements. Our unique Data-Enriched Monetization approach also becomes the starting point for building an organizational Monetization Framework to leverage connected data, generate new customers insights, and enable revenue growth.

So whatever you do, if you think you have a billing problem,  please don’t rush to buy billing software to fix the problem. First, consider the full organizational context and data environment for your quote-to-cash lifecycle and then you’ll be better prepared to define the best solution and technology approach for your business. If you’d like some more food for thought, you might want to check out our white paper “How to Build a Monetization Framework.”