Serving around the world: OneBill, a Silicon Valley company, is poised to disrupt the Billing & Revenue Management space

“We want to stay ahead in embracing emerging technologies to give our customers an edge in maximizing their market and margin opportunities.”

JK Chelladurai, founder and CEO of OneBill, is a seasoned expert in the billing technology space. Back when he was working for Portal Software in 1996, which only provided an on-premise billing solution for their customers, JK was seeing that cost was often a barrier to customers’ adopting new billing technology, as they would have to invest millions of dollars to obtain both the license and the actual solution. As a result, only very large companies had the resources to afford that kind of OSS/BSS solution.

Therefore, JK saw an opportunity to provide a flexible, cloud-based, OSS/BSS solution for businesses of all sizes with varying needs. The core premise was that these customers wouldn’t need a significant upfront investment to get started with their billing solution.

While there were other cloud-based billing solutions in the market at the time, JK found that these offerings were heavily focused on facilitating businesses with subscription-based models. On top of that, these solutions had limitations for other industries such as communications, etc., which heavily rely on other models such as usage-based, rule-based, or overage-based pricing.

Hence, OneBill was created to ensure businesses with any type of pricing model could seamlessly automate and execute their billing process. It has a global presence across four continents, serving 14 different industries.

OneBill is a cloud-based provider of Billing and Revenue Management (BRM) solutions. The company’s Billing & Revenue Management platform provides complete visibility into all receivables, allowing businesses to monetize their products/services efficiently, automate the order fulfillment process, manage channel partners in real-time, and have a 360-degree view of their customer interactions, ultimately accelerating time to market and maximizing revenue.

The Billing & Revenue Management platform is an end-to-end revenue management ecosystem that consists of opportunity tracking, product configuration, quoting, contract management, customer relationship management, order fulfillment, inventory management, consumption rating, taxation, billing, payment processing, A/R management, and revenue recognition, while supporting vendor/reseller management to agent commissioning.

OneBill was incorporated in 2009.

The Silicon Review reached out to OneBill’s Santa Clara headquarters and spoke with Mr. Chelladurai. Here’s what he said.

Interview Highlights

Q. Automated software solutions provide numerous capabilities, but that also means the software can be complex and difficult to use. How do you train the employees and educate them about your solutions?

Through the onboarding process with OneBill, the employees of companies receive end-to-end training on the system, documentation, video tutorials, and also a sandbox environment where they can test and learn and get accustomed to the platform.

Q. Customization can end up diminishing the best practices built into the system and make it more difficult to upgrade in the future. How can businesses avoid this and plan their customization?

These are times when companies want to ‘customize everything’. However, customization doesn’t always drive efficiency. When our customers first approach us, we ask them to clearly outline their core requirements. Then we also look at their current process flows and determine if any other unnecessary activities are occurring that could be solved through automation, or consolidating processes into one BSS/OSS solution.

We often find that once we go through this process, customers don’t need customization, but rather it’s about identifying where there are consolidation and automation opportunities. Through this, they then realize that the features we offer within our existing solution can solve their core problems. Furthermore, at the end of the day, your provider should be one step ahead of you. So, if they don’t have your needs incorporated into their solution, perhaps they are not the right provider after all.

Q. Although it would be great to turn on the computer and leave for the day, automated systems do require monitoring. How can we prevent potential technological failures?

We like to think of a billing platform as an evolving organism. Particularly when it’s integrated with other systems across the enterprise, one small process discrepancy can cause other data integrity issues down the chain. Therefore, we highly recommend having automated triggers in place for when a discrepancy is picked up. Furthermore, it’s important to regularly back up data and test API integrations to identify any potential bottlenecks.

Q. How important is innovation to what you do at OneBill?

Innovation is at the core of everything we do. Our team thrives on solving problems and looking for solutions to make life easier for our customers. We often have large, multinational companies approach us to help them transform their revenue operations, and oftentimes, these companies are made up of smaller businesses that were acquired progressively over some time. Furthermore, each business unit comes with new products and services that require different monetization strategies that may not be supported by their existing legacy billing system. Therefore, it can be particularly rewarding when you see their businesses’ resource time saved and efficiency levels increased when OneBill brings cohesiveness to their revenue operations.

Furthermore, it is equally rewarding working with new startups and getting more deeply involved in collaborating on their product and pricing strategy and how it can be best executed from a billing perspective. It informs a lot of our future product development roadmap as we can uncover new needs that could be served through our platform.

Q. Do you have any new services ready to be launched?

We recently released a fully integrated ‘Shopping Cart’ that enables businesses to deliver a seamless buyer’s journey and transform their customer experience. With the introduction of OneBill’s newly enhanced ‘Shopping Cart,’ businesses can extend OneBill’s functionality to offer products and services through their website. The ultimate objective is to manage the end-to-end customer journey within the platform.

The new ‘Shopping Cart’ features provide the ability to: configure a comprehensive product catalog; white-label the storefront with a custom logo, branding, and URL; facilitate provisioning and fulfillment for the end customer purchases; integrate with a business's existing website; accept varying payment types (example: credit card, e-check with PCI certification); and integrate with OneBill’s other billing and revenue management product features.

Q. What does the future hold for your company and its customers? 

We are excited to work with our team to execute our vision to innovate in Billing and Revenue Management. There is an opportunity for OneBill to disrupt the Billing & Revenue Management space as Salesforce did in the CRM space. We are aggressively innovating and developing features and functionalities to support the industry shift to consumption-based pricing models. Also, we want to stay ahead in embracing emerging technologies to give our customers an edge in maximizing their market and margin opportunities.

JK Chelladurai | Founder & CEO

JK Chelladurai has over 32 years of experience in software development, including over 26 years of experience in building BSS/OSS solutions for the Telecommunications industry. He was one of the founding team members of Portal Software which was acquired by Oracle in 2006. Portal Software was the pioneer in providing real-time billing solutions for telecommunications and internet service providers, such as Vodafone, France Telecom, Telstra, and many tier-1 telecom companies.

“We are aggressively innovating and developing features and functionalities to support the industry shift to consumption-based pricing models.”