Merit Systems, Inc. is an international telecommunications company headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida, USA.

Merit provides international termination, focusing on the Caribbean and Central American markets. Our business primarily involves setting up direct links to foreign locations, establishing connectivity with local PTTs, and terminating international minutes to foreign countries for carriers and prepaid calling card companies in the US.

One crucial element in Merit’s business is the software we use for billing our services. This billing software needs to be robust, web-driven, and geared to the VOIP telecommunications industry. After reviewing other packages, and even attempting to create our own billing software using RADIUS with a SQL Database, we were extremely happy to discover the PortaOne solution. PortaBilling is an excellent package using a similar structure, and we chose it because is extremely user-friendly and quite competitively priced.

Objective

Our billing platform needed to service wholesale, retail and prepaid (calling card) services. After almost a year of researching various billing platforms, we finally decided on PortaBilling. This product turned out to be the best fit for our needs. We also required customization work to meet some specific requests, and PortaOne’s development team far exceeded our expectations in delivering the completed solution on schedule.

Our most important requirement was support for the billing platform as we went through the learning curve in implementing and using the solution. PortaOne’s support has been first-rate in all areas (pre-sales, implementation, post-sales). With the PortaBilling platform now in place, we have been able to focus resources on expanding our business, rather than struggling with the development of our own solution.

Deployment

Our company implemented PortaBilling100 in under two weeks. The two-day training program that was included in the price was conducted in a very professional manner, and quickly alleviated our concerns about adopting a new software platform. We run the software on two Pentium 4 PCs, facilitating several million minutes per month. Any reconfiguration work that might be necessary does not influence the system’s stability.

Results

The primary advantage of the software is its very clear and user-friendly navigation for servicing multiple types of retail and wholesale customers. Also, its account management function is simple and fast, allowing us to benefit from many features that were considered add-on options in other systems we looked at. And, because there is a clear API for straightforward modifications and the creation of additional functionalities, the software has proven to be very flexible.

The professional support we have received from the PortaOne team has always been very prompt and highly competent.