Jim Dunlap is president of Cycle30, a provider of a hosted platform for scalable and reliable converged billing that includes convergent charging, rating and balance management for existing and emerging services across a variety of markets. The platform addresses point-of-sale, self-care, roaming, pre-paid wireless, inventory management, invoicing and other functions today’s cellular and wireless providers need for a complete order-to-cash billing platform. Developed in response to the requirements of its parent company, North American cable provider GCI, Cycle30 is now offering its system to service providers of all types. Here Dunlap tells VanillaPlus how the company is developing solutions to target the M2M market and is moving beyond its home base of North America.
VanillaPlus: As a relative newcomer to the billing market, how have you found 2012?
Jim Dunlap: It’s been a really exciting year. For a young, dynamic newcomer to this market is has been a really great year in terms of the number of contacts we have made and in terms of the excitement around the Cycle30 platform. We’ve had considerable interest in the areas we had identified as having potential and that has proven out. These are now areas in which we have the opportunity to be wildly successful.
VP: Which area would you single out as the one that you can bring the most to?
JD: The commercial space holds a massive opportunity. The existing billing providers are doing a pretty poor job of serving that area and probably represents the greatest opportunity for us to provide a platform for CSPs to serve commercial enterprises.
That starts with offer management and continues through order management, workflow processes and goes all the way through to the ability to do hierarchical complex, converged billing. We’ve identified a very interesting niche and it’s one that’s very often overlooked. The majority of sales prospects we’re dealing with right now are for critical commercial opportunities that can be translated to consumer opportunities in the future.
We’re interested in this sector because it is both an underserved market and we can address it well today because it is our heritage. Our parent company, GCI, has a very, very significant commercial base withcustomers like British Petroleum, the State of Alaska and Wells Fargo as customers. We are supporting those customers today.
VP: Why is the attention suddenly on commercial or enterprise billing?
JD: Complex commercial billing is becoming a big differentiator for CSPs. Instead of focusing on fighting churn and low consumer ARPU, you can replace these kinds of revenue and margins by having a robust and growing enterprise
This is a great opportunity because the needs of the commercial market are different to the consumer sector. The customer knowledge and expectations are higher in the commercial sector and this leads to a more significant set of requirements that need to be fulfilled by the billing platform. The challenge is about how you can apply a set of different technologies to be used in new and different ways and effectively secure enterprise customers for the long term.
VP: What other areas do you see as large opportunities for Cycle30?
JD: We continue to be enthusiastic about the opportunities that exist in the M2M market. Every week we hear of some new solution being developed, launched or in the proof of concept stage. These solutions seem to be an endless stream of value added products and services and involve every industry imaginable. We’re currently looking at solutions in petroleum, public works, health care and consumer sectors, but the breadth of solutions sector.M2M will touch is staggering. We continue to be very excited about our ability to bring value and monetise these services.
We want to continue to work with our partner Arrow Electronics to broaden the range of products we take to market and to develop models for specific industries. We continue to talk with many, many other solutions providers as well.
VP: So how do you address the fragmented demands of the M2M sector? It seems to me that there are so many variables in terms of the services and industries and business models involved.
JD: What we’ve developed is a two-tier approach. Our full-blown proposition includes complex billing, rating and taxation and is able to scale massively in terms of the number of transactions it supports. A utility company is a good example of a suitable application for it but, at the lower level, we’ve developed a simpler model of our platform. With that, we have the ability to bring customers rapidly onto our platform and do simple billing on a monthly recurring model.
Another example is in situations that involve multiple data sources, complex reporting or analytics. We’ve approached that with a twotier solution as well.
You can’t take a one-size fits all approach, you have to have the ability to scale up or down and address varying degrees of complexity. That’s what is so neat about our platform. We’re finding in the M2M market that the upper tier of billing vendors have massive infrastructure in place and are finding it hard to turn their ships to address this high transaction volume market. Our competitors are finding it challenging to make the necessary changes to their value proposition to serve the M2M markets. We are well situated to succeed in this sector and are enthusiastic about its potential.
VP: M2M is still in its early stages – do you see it turning a corner into the mainstream now?
JD: We see M2M as a longer term play. We recognise this is enormous opportunity and are making investments that we believe will pay off handsomely in the future. We are working selectively with our partners to invest and develop solutions including proof of concept and ROI models. It’s a great sector and we continue to believe strongly in it.
VP: As a provider with North American roots how do you plan to access other regions?
JD: We know that there is enormous potential in Europe in the communications, cable and utility sectors. We have a relationship with an international hosting company that means we can rapidly enter any new geographical market with very little complexity on our side. For example, we can access four different data centres in Greater London alone serving the breadth of Europe. That relationship is very strategic for us as we look at markets outside the US.
VP: How are you seeing approaches to billing shift as all these new opportunities emerge?
JD: It’s exciting to be part of a movement that recognises that the old way of doing things is coming to an end. Cycle30’s model is vastly different from others in our space. Our value proposition isn’t that of a software vendor. We bring forward the value of our CSP heritage, combined with technology and process innovation.
At the core of our culture is a deep belief in the value of customer service. There has been an overwhelming response to this focus. It is obvious that the existing providers have lost their way in this regard. We are happy to bring that back to the market. In the end it comes down to doing business with people you trust, the value they bring and their ability to help insure outstanding customer service.
