For today’s service providers to be able to effectively compete in an ever-growing marketplace, they have to be able to be tuned to the demands of today’s communications environment. In order to more efficiently and comprehensively provide the hosted billing services required by its telecom, cable and utility operator customers, hosted billing company Cycle 30 recently implemented the SunGard IT infrastructure.

The Cycle30 platform includes customer management, service fulfillment, billing and revenue management, service assurance, integrations, and business intelligence.

The Seattle-based company required an IT infrastructure to make sure its customers had “always-on” access to hosted billing information, and the redundancy and data security to guard against data loss, whether resulting from a power outage or a wide spread disaster.

The company’s billing engine had already been processing more than 500,000 residential invoices and another 30,000 complex commercial invoices each month, according to a recent case study. Following a 10-month search, during which Cycle30 opened its headquarters in Seattle, the company turned to SunGard Availability Services to provide Enterprise Cloud Services and a dedicated hosted environment to augment its billing services.

In addition, Cycle30 implemented the SunGard IT infrastructure to host a variety of workforce management, provisioning, point-of-sale, activation, thresholding alerts, trouble ticketing and operational tools. Company officials said the hybrid solution of IaaS and dedicated managed environments has helped Cycle30 to achieve high levels of availability and redundancy.

Compared to other hosted billing providers, Cycle30 has open architecture and interfaces with a lot of elements customers are already using. Because of the already upgraded technology, those users can bring in pieces or parts of the hosted billing system, TMCnet’s Susan Campbell recently reported.

The cloud is unique in that cost models and time-to-markets have gotten cheaper from a cost perspective and businesses. A SaaS (News - Alert) cloud model is really attractive to new businesses, emerging markets and even existing businesses that want to leverage a new business model quickly. The hosted billing solution in the cloud enables them to do so efficiently.