Billing is a component of the telecoms industry that every service provider and reseller needs to think about. However, until now, very few organisations have gone beyond the legacy strategies for billing to tap into new and disruptive ways of interacting with their customers. Strategic Imperatives, one of the leaders for SaaS cloud billing in the United Kingdom, is taking billing to a brand-new level with their multi-currency and multi-country billing platform, "Elevate."
Elevate provides today's communications service providers with a flexible and robust platform that they can use to manage multiple currencies and brands at the same time whilst billing for any service, product or event. I caught up with the Managing Director of Strategic Imperatives, Wail Sabbagh to learn more about this innovative company, and the unique billing solution that they provide.
Tell Us About Strategic Imperatives
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Wail Sabbagh[/caption]
First, I was keen to learn more about the background of Strategic Imperatives as a company. Wail told me that the business began in 2006 fundamentally as a technology organisation. "We've always operated as a SaaS model from day one, starting off in the provisioning world, and moving over into the billing environment about four years ago. Today we have about 200 customers all the way from big companies like Vodafone, Plusnet, and Verizon, to smaller resellers and brands."
Wail himself has been in the technology industry for a long time. "I come from a technology background, starting off as a developer, and then gradually moving on to develop Strategic Imperatives."
Today, the organisation's customer base is made up of service providers and resellers from various backgrounds, although Wail noted that they plan on focusing heavily on telecommunications customers in the future.
Current Trends
For everyone connected to the telecoms world, there have been some significant changes in the market over recent years. The Telco space is brimming with growth, consolidation, and the continued movement to the cloud. I asked Wail what kinds of trends he's noticed in the last 12 months ago.
"Growth is everywhere. We're seeing consolidation across the board, and new start-ups coming into the market too. The interesting thing is that the profiles of those start-ups have changed slightly, they're much more tech savvy today than they once were."
Wail noted that a critical change for Strategic Imperatives in the last few years has been the way that customers have begun to embrace SaaS as a go-to-market strategy. "When we first started selling a SaaS offering, it wasn't easy. Now, SaaS is almost a requirement, as people want things that work more seamlessly in any environment.
“A fundamental change for us over the last three to four years is when we first stated going to a customer and telling them we had a SaaS offering - it was a hard sell. What we've seen now is that SaaS is almost a requirement. In terms of companies looking for solutions, SaaS is the preferred options - also, from a solution perspective, there has been a definite move away from the closed systems of a few years ago, and today, there is more of a requirement for APIs, open integration and so on.”
