CASE STUDY
Markley Group Scales Innovative IaaS Business with BillingPlatform
Background
Markley Group is a premier provider of mission-critical data center solutions including colocation, connectivity and cloud services. As Markley expanded their offerings, they saw a need for an automated billing solution that would support these new products and services.
The Challenge
Innovation Requires New Pricing Tactics
“Cloud is a growing segment for us,” said Robert Sass, Markley Group’s Vice President of Finance. “The cloud group offers a complete set of infrastructure services, including storage, computing, data protection and disaster recovery services.” Though Markley continues with traditional monthly fee-based pricing of its data center product portfolio, cloud services required some innovative tactics.“
Intense Manual Billing Processes
The usage-based rates offered by cloud services required complex calculations that were difficult to process using traditional billing systems. Because of this complexity, the team had relied heavily on cumbersome manual billing processes.
“The process before BillingPlatform was 100% manual,” said Liliana DiazGranados-O’Donnell, Finance Director for Markley Cloud Services. “It took more than a week to complete the billing each month.”
Cloud Provider Supports New Business Line with Cloud-based Billing
With a rapidly growing cloud services business, Markley Group needed to automate billing while maintaining its agility. By implementing BillingPlatform, Markley was able to:
- Automate the billing process for its rapidly growing Cloud and Network Services business lines
- Reduce billing time from days to hours
- Produce accurate revenue and product reports to identify trends in customer adoption of new technologies
“With BillingPlatform our invoicing process went from six days down to one.”
Liliana DiazGranados-O’Donnell, Finance Director
The Solution
Searching for the Right Solution
“We looked at about a half dozen alternatives,” said Robert Sass. “We narrowed the field and made a pretty quick decision in selecting BillingPlatform.”
“The BillingPlatform interface was very user-friendly,” said Liliana DiazGranados-O’Donnell. “The basic system itself was easy to follow. Because it’s a well-designed system, BillingPlatform is also easier to modify ‘on the fly’ as needed.”
Markley felt that BillingPlatform’s proven track record in supporting usage-based, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) pricing tactics made it the right choice for the company.
Implementing Quickly for Fast Production
Once they selected BillingPlatform, Markley worked closely with the Professional Services team to determine the right steps for implementation. Over a six-week period, BillingPlatform created several custom attributes to serve the particular needs of Markley Cloud Services, then configured location-based rating for contracts.
Once the business-specific attributes were created, Liliana implemented the full BillingPlatform solution and complex rating and invoicing in less than a day.
BillingPlatform offered several key benefits:
Streamlined production with automated custom invoicing, tailored for cloud billing
Simple accurate invoicing with easy-to-implement, customer-specific pricing models
Improved customer satisfaction with automated generation and email delivery of invoices
"[BillingPlatform] implementation was painless and it has worked flawlessly ever since."
Robert Sass, Vice President of Finance
The Results
Increased Efficiency through Billing Automation
Markley now has a flexible automated invoicing system in place with BillingPlatform. “Everyone on our leadership team was pleased with the results. Customers are happy and it gives us the reports we need at the push of a button” said Robert Sass.
“Our invoicing process went from six days down to one,” said Liliana DiazGranados-O’Donnell. “This gives us more confidence in our overall process, more time for internal review and timely delivery of accurate invoices to our customers.”
Markley now enjoys a complete billing solution by offering the only consolidated solution that’s flexible enough to support the pricing and invoicing practices required for Markley's digital transformation. BillingPlatform supports the agility needed to help Markley continue to expand its product offerings.