Kenan Technologies Unveils Arbor™/BP Version 4.0 For Comprehensive Billing And Customer Care; Market Leading Billing and Customer Care Product Speeds New Operators' Entrance Into Converging Markets

Business Wire, Oct 30, 1995

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 30, 1995--Kenan Technologies, a leading supplier of next-generation billing, customer care, and business support systems for the converging telecommunications, interactive services and cable TV industries, today announced general availability of the newest release of Arbor/BP, the world's most advanced UNIX-based and production-proven invoicing and customer care platform.

Arbor/BP 4.0 includes many new features that enhance flexibility, increase ease-of-use and speed implementation. Kenan Technologies will introduce Arbor/BP 4.0 at Internet World (Booth #1166) in Boston, October 30-November 1.

"Companies seeking to do business in the dynamic interactive services markets are facing the same challenge as the telecommunications vendors -- responding quickly to changes in the marketplace with competitive products and sales strategies," said Kenan Sahin, president Kenan Systems Corporation.

"Today's announcement highlights Arbor/BP's powerful feature set which allows service providers to get to market fast with highly flexible services and gives them the ability to scale-up to meet any level of demand. Moreover, the use of a production-proven system such as Arbor/BP minimizes the risks typically associated with implementing or upgrading billing systems."

New Features Enhance Core Billing Product

One new Arbor/BP feature is the Customizable Bill Format. Arbor/BP now takes a customer-driven approach to invoice formatting. End-user organizations are offered a suite of text and format templates, including support for multiple languages and currencies, that can be combined in unique ways to create unique bill formats.

"The customizable bill formats not only allow us to provide billing in any language, including our native Malaysian language, but we can also introduce new products and services and promote them in our bills within one day," commented Mohd. Jaafar Ismail, CEO of TIME Telekom (Malaysia).

The comprehensive new features available in Arbor/BP 4.0 reaffirm Kenan Technologies' leadership in delivering complete, production hardened, billing and customer care products to telecommunications, interactive, and cable TV service providers. Arbor/BP 4.0 also includes the following new features:

-- Adjunct Biller Interface (ABI). This powerful tool allows operators and service providers to integrate billing streams generated by other billing systems into Arbor/BP, providing a single, unified invoice, fully totaled and journaled, to the customer.

-- Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). A set of object-oriented APIs is now available to create dynamic integrations with other applications. By using these "generic" APIs, customers and third party integrators can quickly integrate Arbor/BP into existing computing environments.

-- Bill Image Server. The Bill Image Server provides operators with on-line customer access to bills on demand. It enables operators to store images of customers bills, view those invoices and transmit them electronically. Automatic text compression significantly reduces the storage space needed to hold bills on-line. Created as a separate module, the bill image server can reside on the same platform as the core billing and customer care functions, or on its own system.

-- Account Hierarchy Browser. The Account Hierarchy Browser is a graphical tool that assists customer support personnel in navigating complex customer account hierarchies.

-- Support for Electronic Funds Transfer Kenan Technologies has added another payment option, electronic funds transfer, to its series of payment options. Arbor/BP 4.0 supports customer payments by check, credit card, direct debit and electronic funds transfer. Existing partnerships with Checkfree(R) and CES(R) facilitate the payment process.

-- On-line Help. Arbor/BP 4.0 includes integrated, context sensitive on-line help that assists end users navigate the graphical user interface applications.

These enhancements will make it easier for customers and third parties to implement and support multiple service offerings in increasingly complex network environments. About Arbor/BP

Arbor/BP is the industry-leading UNIX-based invoicing and customer care solution. It has been licensed by a number of Fortune 100 telecommunications and information services companies including AT&T, US WEST, British Telecom, and Delphi Internet. Kenan Systems provides a full complement of integration, training, and maintenance services in support of Arbor/BP deployments.

Arbor/BP provides comprehensive billing functions, including: message processing, rating, discounting, bill production, remittance processing, accounts receivables, collections, and journaling. At the same time, Arbor/BP provides critical customer care functions including provisioning, account inquiry, and adjustments. Arbor/BP's flexible architecture ensures that it can also be tailored to meet the unique billing and customer service requirements of diverse providers.

The system operates over distributed, highly scalable and flexible UNIX-based environments. Arbor/BP's architecture exploits multi-processing hardware platforms to provide high-volume transaction throughput. Utilizing a high performance SQL engine and a comprehensive graphical-user interface, the billing solution offers support for a distributed client/server architecture. Kenan Systems Corporation