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space, but can range outside of the CSP market as an enabler for all sorts of payment systems, from POS terminals and stored value cards to automated toll tags. Tribold has built a solid business in the product and offer management arena. This is a complex and increasingly pressured area of functionality that is often a weakness for legacy billing environments.

Then there is Info Directions, a company that has made the Inc 5000 the past two years, doubled in size in the past four years, and was named one of the best companies to work for in New York State in 2009. Roughly 6 years ago, the company took a big chance and rebuilt its Cost Guard billing, selling, and operations solution on .NET and C#.

They Called It “ASP”
Don Culeton and his engineers believed that the application service provider (ASP) model, as it was then called, was where things were headed. Despite the fact that its business grew up with onsite solutions, Info Directions launched its new product as a .NET-based ASP offering and had to convince customers to change.

“Our customers have caught up with us and this decision to go in the SaaS direction,” says Don Culeton, founder and president for Info Directions. About SaaS models, he says they “are obvious now, but back then it wasn’t the case.” He says a panel of customers spoke at the company’s recent User Group meetings about converting to the SaaS way of thinking after being reluctant to change early on.

Info Directions is a Microsoft Gold Partner which, says the company, they’ve leveraged for marketing but only more recently for engineering. “We sent a lot of developers off to Tech Ed over the last four years,” says Culeton. He says his company has learned how to optimize how they use Microsoft technology and “as a result we have overhauled major components of our architecture.

Of those new components, Ray Shear, senior engineer, says “we were running 600,000 invoices per hour and we weren’t really breathing hard.”  He says that with a combination of Microsoft’s latest software and new Intel hardware “our scale numbers are dramatically better than we’ve ever seen. The architecture seems to scale linearly as we

approaches and is both PCI and CPNI compliant. This company provides an example of were good engineering applied to Microsoft technology can produce a real carrier grade platform.

The Revenue Side
Microsoft’s McGuigan says that his company is becoming more of a partner to CSPs than a vendor because “we are working with them on the revenue generating side.” Microsoft is involved in IPTV roll outs that represent new revenue streams for CSPs. Microsoft also partners with telcos in the SMB space to offer a load of value-added applications – email, collaboration, unified communications, CRM, security, backup and restore, hosted Exchange, hosted Sharepoint, and data center services. “Microsoft is a service provider in that sense,” McGuigan says. He adds as these offerings roll out, Microsoft is finding that “an offer that has a Microsoft brand and a CSP brand is more powerful than either brand independently.”

Being a partner to CSPs across so many different arenas vastly differentiates Microsoft from most BSS suppliers. BSS vendors tend to interact with very specific organizations for what can be limited engagements. In most cases Microsoft’s partnership occurs at a strategic or even Board level. It is a fundamental technology partner, not just a solution supplier. So while we may not typically think of Microsoft as a BSS supplier, because it’s not a pure play vendor, we can’t overlook its growing presence across CSP organizations, including the BSS domain.