Xerox, Sun and iPlanet Team Up to Ease E-Billing

Xerox Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc. and Mountain View, Calif.-based iPlanet E-Commerce Solutions recently joined forces to create a package for financial service and health care organizations to send bills and statements electronically.
A single account team from Rochester, N.Y.-based Xerox will market, sell, install and service the product, which includes Sun's Solaris servers and iPlanet's e-commerce software. The core of the package is iPlanet BillerXpert.
Using this bundle of hardware, software and services, companies can place large volumes of customer bills or statements on their Web sites or deliver them as e-mail.
A Sun official noted that companies can bring the online billing capability in-house or use an outsourcer.
By adding servers and e-commerce software to its high-volume billing service, Xerox will be one of the few companies that addresses all five parts of the online billing process.
Michael Killen, chairman of Palo Alto, Calif.-based Killen & Associates Inc., said that about 70 companies offer to handle some of these steps for a biller but that only a handful, such as IBM and eDocs Inc., can handle everything involved.
Killen said the market for online billing service providers is huge: Today, companies issue approximately 61 billion bills per year worldwide. He predicted that this year, companies will spend about $7 billion on software, equipment and services for online billing.
Currently, electronic statements are usually duplicates of paper statements still being sent to customers -- a convenience but not a cost-cutting measure for billers.
But Philip Pilibosian, a Xerox senior vice president, said that within 12 to 18 months, paper statements might be replaced completely by Web-based or e-mail statements.
The Xerox Internet Presentment Solution is available now. Pricing starts at $250,000 but varies by complexity.