Profitec Wins a Big Customer, Moves to Bigger Building

By Ken Branson

Profitec, Inc. (www.profitecinc.com) Booth 900, the billing service and software company from Wallingford, CT has a major new customer win and has moved to a new headquarters building.

The two things are not unrelated, according to Randy Minervino, Profitec’s vice president of sales & marketing.

The new customer is the ACC Business Division of AT&T Corp. (www.att.com), which will use Profitec’s flagship Omnibill system to rate and bill their calls. ACC is the last standalone remnant of the former ACC Telecom of Rochester, NY. In 1999, it changed its focus to provide discount long distance service to businesses nationwide – over AT&T’s network, but in competition with AT&T, according to Matt Beattie, ACC’s managing director.

The division once provided local service and will do so again as AT&T gets into local service, Beattie says.

“About 75 percent of new billing sales come with
some sort of customer service component”
Randy Minervino, vice president of marketing, Profitec

In preparation for it’s change of focus, ACC realized it had to change it’s legacy, non-Y2K-compliant billing system, Beattie Says. The fact that Profitec had done other business with ACC since 1992 didn’t hurt.

“We decided to go with Profitec. One, because they were familiar; two, because we were impressed with their Windows based interface; and three, they had a very low up-front cost,” Beattie says. “Most charges are usage based. If I don’t succeed in generating much business I don’t have to pay more.”

Beattie says all his customers have been moved over to Omnibill 7.x, as of January 1.

Omnibill 7.x includes Access-A-Bill, a client bill presentment and analysis tool, Minervino says.

“The customer tells Omnibill that you want web or electronic billing,” he says. “Omnibill, receiving the billing files, executes a job that creates the Access-A-Bill files, and either puts them on the website or shoots them out via e-mail

Minervino says that the ACC win was one factor pushing Profitec down the road – literally, almost – to its new headquarters. The new building is 40,000 square feet, up from 24,000 square fee.

“About 75 percent of new billing sales come with some sort of customer service component,” Minervino Says. “So there’s been tremendous growth of the business services division.”

“Our call center has 150 stations, and it’s expandable to 200. For Nextel (Communications, Inc., www.nextel.com) for example, everything from order entry to provisioning happens in our shop, using our systems. 800 numbers ring in our building and are answered in a branded fashion,” Minervino says.

Profitec is a privately held, family owned business, which has done a little of this and a little of that trying to remain flexible to market demand.

“A couple of years ago, we were billers who did software development as a consequence of billing,” Minervino says. “Some of our clients asked us to take on customer service functions. And because our tools were designed to do that for clients, our business really took off. [Software] is a third of our revenue now.”