Saritel Chooses Solect's IP Billing Software to Enable Telecom Italia's Wholesale ISP Offering

Business Wire, June 7, 1999

TORONTO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 7, 1999--

Solect Technology Group, the leading provider of IP billing and customer care software, today announced Saritel, a Telecom Italia group company, has chosen Solect's billing software, IAF, to enable the X2000 Virtual Office. The integration of IAF's service management and customer care application combined with Netscape SuiteSpot allows Telecom Italia, under the brand name of "Village Business 2000" (VB2000) to offer the first commercial package to combine a comprehensive set of Internet services in a flexible, modular format.

The flexible service creation and management schema enabled by IAF has spawned a class of service providers known as Wholesale ISPs. Telecom Italia can now sell both bandwidth and management capabilities to its ISPs, who themselves can manage and resell these solutions to their business customers.

"Through our X2000 Virtual Office, IAF offers our customers the ability to self-manage their Internet needs," said Bruno Cerboni, executive vice president of project and product development, Saritel. "This kind of power is essential in the Internet Age because it accommodates the rapid growth of user populations and deployment of new services while maintaining highly detailed usage and billing profiles."

IAF's integrated architecture promotes pluggable services through the IAF Service Management module. The IAF PDCs (Provisioning Data Collectors) eliminate the need to recompile application code to ensure rapid time-to-market for new services with proven reliability. The IAF hierarchical user creation and security schema allows managers to create multiple branded companies with selective access, based on permissions and unlimited sub-accounts all running under a single instance of X2000. Today X2000 is being used by the Vatican to tie together over 300 delegations in 130 countries worldwide in preparation for its upcoming celebration of the year 2000, Jubilaeum.

"Saritel is looking to the future to build and support emerging services and technology platforms," said Kevin Kimsa, president and COO of Solect. "We understand the flexibility required in today's service driven network and our IAF PDC plug-ins enable quick development allowing Saritel to take hold of this explosive market opportunity."

About Saritel

Founded in 1983, Saritel, a Telecom Italia Group company, is one of the oldest Internet-related companies in Europe. An industry pioneer throughout the 1980s, Saritel was one of the first to offer email and electronic data interchange (EDI) technology in the Italian market. Fully owned by Telecom Italia, today Saritel is the largest Italian Internet service factory, solutions provider, and outsourcer of value-added services on the Net. Saritel also provides advanced services and solutions in voice management, such as voice messaging and interactive voice response (IVR) systems.

About Solect

Solect is shaping the new public network with IAF, the world's leading integrated billing, customer care and service management software solution for service providers. Headquartered in Toronto, Canada, with offices in the United States, United Kingdom and Hong Kong, Solect has over 60 Service Provider installations globally. Solect began building software infrastructure solutions for commercial ISPs as early as 1993, maintaining a singular focus on the Internet. Solect has developed strategic partnerships with leading technology companies, such as Sun Microsystems, Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, Netscape, Bellcore, Oracle, and Nokia, which has ensured Solect's products are continually refined to incorporate all the latest technology to meet the requirements of the rapidly changing world of the Internet. Visit Solect at http://www.solect.com.