Billing Bureau's David Werdiger presents on Smart Billing to members of the AusCloud forum in Melbourne. He spoke about the economic underpinnings of cloud computing, and the implications for billing and pricing strategies

2. • Pricing & billing
• Pricing models & strategies
• Billing processes
• Case studies
• Wrap up

3. • Telco & subscription billing & pricing“guru”
• Entrepreneur; ADHD opportunity “juggler”
• Blogger; writer; public speaker
• Founder & director: Billing Bureau, TBG, KISS Mobile
• Several not-for-profit directorships

4. • Pricing & Billing are two sides of the same
coin – the coin is your revenue!
• Pricing is a marketing function – how
much to charge for a service
• Billing is an operational function – how to
extract that charge from your customers
• Which should drive which? Who is in
charge?

5. • Why bother?
• Freemium
• Subscription pricing
• Value-based pricing

6. 0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
Jan Feb Mar Jun Jul Aug
Revenue
Cost

7. BlahBlah
Freemium
• Time/usage-bound
• Feature limited
Why do it?
• Reciprocity: give before you ask
• Use the free service promote your real value. Is the free
version useful? Does it cost you anything to deliver?
• Will it automatically fill a sales pipeline for you? How well
does your service sell itself?

8. Subscription and usage based income
• Lowers the barrier to try product and therefore adopt it
• Cost recovery perspective: subscription component can facilitate
recovery of fixed vendor costs; usage component can facilitate
recovery of variable costs; but it doesn’t have to work that way!
• The most profit you will ever make is selling something that is
never used
• Usage based can often help you to price the value you deliver for
more costly subscribers and monetise added features
• One size doesn’t fit all

9. • Think like a customer
• What is the value they are receiving for the
price they pay? Do they correlate?
• What is the opportunity cost? TCO?
• Are you leaving money on the table?
• Using metrics of customer (perceived) value as
a pricing input

10. • A sound pricing strategy can help you:
• Differentiate
• Extract more value
• Manage customer behaviour
• Attract different market segments

11. Billing
Pricing
SmartStupid
Stupid Smart

12. • More than just sending out bills!
• Account creation; credit checks, etc
• Provisioning the service and service attributes &
options
• Bill presentment and delivery
• Customer (self) service
• Payments facilitation: credit terms, reconciliation
• Called OSS/BSS but really part of the billing process

13. • Billing is complex (in other breaking
news, gravity causes objects to fall to the
earth).
• Billing needs to be driven by price strategy not
the other way around.
• Scalability is everything
• Flexibility and adaptability; can it keep up with
the speed of market changes?
• Is billing a nightmare? A distraction? How ‘core’
is it?

14. Online service business, owner with a software
background with a specific niche opportunity.
Challenge:
• Not interested in building and managing a back
office.
Results:
• Automated
billing, payments, reconciliations, collection and
commissions.
• Scalable platform for growth.

15. Property management and service business.
Challenge:
• Not billing every service. Some customers consuming
more time and cost than others but not reflected in
the price strategy.
Opportunity:
• Capture billing events through multiple interfaces to
ensure everything is billed.
• Facilitated price strategy for “care plans” to be
implemented.

16. Mobile web sites
Challenge:
• Managing multiple and diverse channels, multi-
currency, both wholesale and retail
• Seeking a pathway to become an infrastructure and cloud
services aggregator
Results:
• Mobile portal for in-person sales
• Integrated service provisioning
• Wholesale billing with “UDR” feed as well as white label
billing

17. • Think about pricing strategy and what it can
do for you
• Don’t let the billing cart lead the pricing
horse. Allow your marketing to be creative
and have fun!
• Consider end-to-end processes and look for
impediments to scalability

18. • Billing Bureau have been doing this for over
15 years; first for telcos and now services
• We live and breathe it
• Experts in convergent billing and automation
and scalability of billing & related processes
• Cloud billing will only become more
complex; we have already done it all

19. • Any questions?? All clear as mud?
• For more information, contact
• Ben Wortley; Sales and Marketing Director
03 8611 1111 / 0438 236 643; benw@billing.com.au
• David Werdiger; Chairman
0412 389 389; david@billing.com.au