Australian billing company MultiBill will move to an on-demand infrastructure to provision its utilities and local government services under a new, five-year, multimillion dollar contract.
MulitBill will use IBM's Virtual Server Services (VSS), built on the company's System P technology to charge its clients on a per-usage basis for management of customer and billing processes.
Computing resources will be allocated according to billing cycles and client numbers based on IBM's virtualized environment which uses Peace 8, Oracle and Formfill applications. The pricing will be based on bills processed.
MultiBill CEO, Jacqueline Clarke said the pay-per-user service will avoid up-front costs for its clients.
"IBM's solution means that the intellectual property we have built up through decades of experience is now available at a per-customer price, hosted from a secure IBM data centre, without the up-front investment," Clarke said.
MultiBill will also use an IP telephony and call centre solution based on Cisco Systems' Call Manager and Unity platforms.
"Whether the bill is paper or electronic, we need to produce it in the most cost-effective way so that our clients can invest those funds in growing their businesses," Clarke said.
IBM infrastructure management services executive Michelle Bendschneider said VSS will help Multibill achieve "dynamic scalability" without IT management "headaches" or up-front infrastructure investment.