Service Provider Networks / (none) /

Digital Island and Xacct lock horns over billing software

By Jim Duffy
The Edge, 06/15/01

An ugly dispute has erupted following Digital Island's decision to bounce one billing software vendor in favor of another.

DI has selected Narus as its new billing vendor following a 16-month ordeal trying to get Xacct's software to work with its network, says Troy Saxton-Getty, vice president of IS and technology at the service provider. The Xacct software started working properly only at the very end of the staging process, by which time DI had already decided to switch vendors, he says.

"We had a considerable amount of failure with Xacct, over and over, and never really any success right up until the very last month," Saxton-Getty says. "Finally, on the very last attempt, they did get it to work but it took a huge amount of resources from their company," as well as huge hourly consultant fees, he adds.

The final bill from Xacct to DI was $3.3 million, which DI haggled down to $60,000, Saxton-Getty says. Xacct says these figures are incorrect and that DI still owes the company money.

"I have a signed acceptance letter from Troy [Saxton-Getty]" for purchase of the Xacct product, says Anil Uberoi, senior vice president of marketing and business development at Xacct. "They [DI] owe us close to $1 million. The bill was presented to them, unfortunately, during the time that they had just posted a $1.4 billion loss for the quarter. This is a clear case of non-payment."

The situation is further complicated by the acquisition of DI by Cable & Wireless, which is an Xacct customer.

DI bills subscribers based on usage of streaming media, media content and caching services. Information gathered for billing can also be used to hammer out and enforce service-level agreements with subscribers.

The service provider, which employs a large number of Cisco routers and switches, uses Cisco's NetFlow accounting technology to gather data on IP packets and flows. NetFlow generates 120G bytes of router packet record data daily on the DI network, which has seven data centers serving 35 countries.

Billing software, such as those from Narus and Xacct, collects all this data from the routers and switches, correlates it and presents it as digestible information with which to invoice subscribers.

DI developed a homegrown billing system five years ago but reached its scalability limits. Consultants that were hired to develop a second-generation billing system advised DI that it was a temporary "stepping stone" to a commercially available system, Saxton-Getty says.

The consultants brought in Xacct and were unsuccessful in implementing the company's software from January 2000 to July 2000, Saxton-Getty says.

"I thought potentially what was going on was the consultants were sabotaging the success of this product, thinking maybe it would be a longer term revenue stream for themselves," he says.

Saxton-Getty suggested letting the consultants go and working directly with Xacct.

"We paid them in full for everything past due to start off with a good gesture going forward," Saxton-Getty says.

At that time, DI began discussions with Narus on a billing system for DI's content delivery network. But DI was moving forward with Xacct on all other components of the service provider's network.

Every month between July 2000 and January 2001, DI failed to go into production mode with the Xacct software. The implementation should have taken only three months from start to finish, Saxton-Getty says.

Finally, in February 2001, the Xacct software worked, but DI was also running Narus' software simultaneously with the Xacct package, comparing the two products. Narus impressed Saxton-Getty.

"They were able to capture all of the traffic without any data loss," he says. "We actually didn't think they would do it."

DI never made a full 30-day collection with the Xacct software without encountering some major problem that caused the service provider to lose revenue, he says.

"The entire time we attempted to run the Xacct product as our primary billing platform we were never successful," Saxton-Getty says. "All the while, we ran the homegrown system, which allowed us to minimize the revenue loss. It was like a safety blanket underneath the high-wire."

Xacct never gave DI a clear explanation for why its software would not work, Saxton-Getty says. When DI requested insight into the software's design in an attempt to fix the implementation, Xacct intervened, and the professional services bills piled up, he says.

"At the end when we asked them to cease and desist, we actually received a bill for professional services for every single month, all the way back to the beginning of the relationship," Saxton-Getty says. "I consider that borderline unethical."

However, Xacct's Uberoi says DI never figured out how it wanted Xacct's software to work in its environment.

"Troy [Saxton-Getty] and his team had no clue what they needed to do," Uberoi says. "Ninety percent [of the several month endeavor] was spent educating, training and fixing their problems. Most of the work was time and labor. I had engineers on their site for weeks at a time. For you to think that it's all free is not fair. Licensing the software is one thing but the time and labor we invested in fixing their problems - knowingly, based on their statement of work - they refused to pay."

Instead of taking legal action against Xacct to dispute the $3.3 million bill, DI met with company founders and high-level executives and negotiated its way down to $60,000, which helped salve some of the wounds, Saxton-Getty says.

"I'm completely pleased with the upper management of that company," he says. "I think that our uniqueness was something that they were having trouble [with], just due to the sheer volume of the data. We lost confidence in their ability to deliver and went with a different product."

Xacct says the issue is not yet resolved.

"We still believe we have every right to that payment," Uberoi says. "We're still in discussion for settlement of dues. We're hopeful for a mutual resolution."

Contact Edge Managing Editor Jim Duffy