Usage rating subscription billing has been a great fit for the Unified Communications (News - Alert)-as-a-Service (UCaaS) marketplace for some time now. The explosion of the Internet of Things (IoT) has created even more opportunities for this type of billing, but also drives complexities and challenges.
LogiSense (News - Alert) Corporation, a company that specializes in software for agile usage rating subscription billing, is ready to meet those challenges as it expands into the realm of IoT and M2M communications. CEO and Founder Flavio Gomes met with Erik Linask (News - Alert), group editorial director of TMCnet, at the recent ITEXPO Florida to discuss what LogiSense has been up to and where the company is going.
“There’s this new movement that’s happening within our markets and that we’ve kind of termed the usage economy,” said Gomes. “Consumers and end users are tired of paying for very rigid billing subscription models.”
LogiSense addresses this demand by placing usage rating at the core of its complex subscription billing platform. The end goal is to create a balance between providers of digitized services and consumers by offering a personalized pricing model that considers the monetization priorities of service providers.
Usage rating is largely accomplished through mediation, the practice of gathering usage records and massaging that data and information to make it billable in a useful manner. Gomes said the B2B environment inherent in UCaaS and IoT services also creates additional complexities when it comes to pooling, bundling and discounting certain services.
“What we’re finding now, in the IoT marketplace, is that they’re experiencing some of the same challenges (as UCaaS),” said Gomes. Extremely granular, personalized pricing models are key to the success of IoT services, and yet many billing platforms simply can’t handle this usage-based model. He added that IoT is a nascent marketplace comprised of “microtransactions” and micropayments that may each represent fairly low value. When pooled together, however, they become compelling.
The LogiSense platform pulls usage information in real-time from all types of back-office applications, based on any type of triggered event. The result is an accurate and precise monetization solution designed to prevent revenue leaks and enable extreme agility and flexibility.
Gomes said the company is looking at predictive analytics and business intelligence as it moves forward, based on the massive amounts of data being collected from usage-based processes. In January, LogiSense announced that its EngageIP Usage Rating and Billing Platform had been chosen by Numerex (News - Alert) Corp for its hosted IoT vertical solutions.