EDS selects Starfire to power interactive billing service

A growing roster of Fortune 500 clients are using EDS Interactive Billing Services, or iBilling, to issue customer invoices reaping estimated savings of 40 percent. The combined EDS/Sun solution offers competitive advantage to telecommunications companies, banks and other large organizations by enabling them to combine all performance demands with the convenience of a single system.

EDS' E.solutions unit recently debuted its highly successful U.S. Interactive Billing Services in Europe, extending major billers and connected businesses more options than ever in receiving, analyzing, and paying bills on that continent. For business customers, the offering provides, for the first time, the capability to ``talk back'' to their bill via the Internet, e-mail and special, new customer service features. At the heart of this new functionality is Sun's Starfire server.

``The iBilling system offers tremendous value for telecommunications companies and others with enormous billing requirements,'' said Howard Anderson, president of The Yankee Group, a global leader in IT research and advisory services. ``Most billing systems on the market have been obsolete for five years. The offering from EDS provides a powerful and robust solution and sets a new standard in this market.''

Sun's Starfire server multi-hosting capability allows EDS to dedicate a single domain to each customer in a highly secure environment. The system is designed for flexibility and allows EDS to dynamically adjust the processing power applied to various domains in sync with variations in client billing cycles. Thus, each client receives extra capacity at times when demands are greatest. For backup, EDS has Sun Starfire systems in other EDS locations to build redundancy.

EDS is the first company to provide large businesses with a truly full-scale Internet billing service. All four steps in processing invoices -- including data extraction, bill presentment, payment, and remittance -- are seamlessly managed by iBilling. The service was designed for businesses with massive billing volumes; Sun's Starfire server not only satisfies the capacity and scalability requirements of iBilling and its customers, but it also enables system availability guarantees up to 99.975 percent within clustered environments. The Starfire server - with its availability guarantee and workload/client separation and security - comes as a single system to be configured into multiple servers, enabling Application Service Providers (ASPs) to control costs and reduce complexity while managing rapid growth.

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