Touting Scalability and simplicity, Mid America Computer Corp. has been on a tear lately, announcing agreements with Independent telcos and other service providers to use its billing solutions.

Seven telecom companies — a mixture of Independents, CLECs and ISPs — have signed up in the last four months. The most recent came in early January, when MACC announced that Saddleback Communications, a voice and Internet provider in Arizona, would use its carrier access billing system (CABS) services.

MACC's stable of customers includes more than 350 service providers nationwide. Craig Aman, president and CEO of MACC, sees the company's recent flurry of activity as a culmination of a number of factors.

“Really, what we've done over time is done the groundwork, so to speak,” Aman said. “We've gone out and established relationships with the various ILECs and other communications providers out there.”

In addition to CABS services, some users are signing up for Customer Master, MACC's business support system solution. Deployed at a user's site, Customer Master enables customer billing management and works with processes such as trouble tickets, E911 and switch activation. It also can produce convergent bills for bundled services such as triple play.

Aman said this kind of flexibility is a selling point for Customer Master, but he believes scalability and simplicity play equal roles.

“You have one product that does all these things, and so if something's not working, you go look at that product,” he said. “As opposed to some companies have 10 different products that they try and interface together and, oh boy, if it kind of goes down, ‘Shoot, was it this, this, this or this that wasn't interfaced properly?’”

Simplicity attracted Matt Crocker, president of Crocker Communications, a Massachusetts CLEC, to go with MACC for Customer Master and CABS services late last year. Crocker said the company, which primarily provides business customers with hosted-IP PBX service, uses seven billing platforms and wants to consolidate down to three before consolidating to one.

“We're approaching our company in a similar fashion where we're converging the network support, network installation along with the voice and data, so that we can go into a [business] and be their converged source for all things communication,” Crocker said. “And the Customer Master billing software is going to allow us to bill for all of those applications.”

The CABS services also appealed to Crocker for much the same reasons. MACC handles all data collection, processing and carrier bill creation in-house.

Ultimately, Aman acknowledged the challenges for smaller service providers such as Crocker — something in which he sees MACC playing a part.

“It's not always easy for small/mid-sized LECs to go out and hire the talent that they need to run their business in the best possible way,” Aman said. “So we feel that we have that talent here, and we're able to provide direction, leadership, consulting-type services to these ILECs out there that they might otherwise not be able to get on their own.”