Sun's technology, including the Sun Enterprise 10000 (popularly known as
Starfire) server and Java technology have been selected to support EDS'
new Interactive Billing Service -- iBilling. The decision to strengthen
its relationship with Sun enhances EDS' leadership in the exploding
electronic business marketplace, and confirms Sun's role as a global
technology supplier.
A growing roster of Fortune 500 clients are using EDS Interactive
Billing Services, or iBilling, to issue customer invoices reaping
estimated savings of 40 percent. The combined EDS/Sun solution offers
competitive advantage to telecommunications companies, banks and other
large organizations by enabling them to combine all performance demands
with the convenience of a single system.
EDS' E.solutions unit recently debuted its highly successful U.S.
Interactive Billing Services in Europe, extending major billers and
connected businesses more options than ever in receiving, analyzing, and
paying bills on that continent. For business customers, the offering
provides, for the first time, the capability to reply to bill via the
Internet, e-mail, and special, new customer service features. At the
heart of this new functionality is Sun's Starfire server.
Sun's Starfire server multi-hosting capability allows EDS to dedicate a
single domain to each customer in a highly secure environment. The
system is designed for flexibility and allows EDS to dynamically adjust
the processing power applied to various domains in sync with variations
in client billing cycles. Thus, each client receives extra capacity at
times when demands are greatest. For backup, EDS has Sun Starfire
systems in other EDS locations to build redundancy.
EDS is the first company to provide large businesses with a truly
full-scale Internet billing service. All four steps in processing
invoices -- including data extraction, bill presentment, payment, and
remittance -- are seamlessly managed by iBilling. The service was
designed for businesses with massive billing volumes; Sun's Starfire
server not only satisfies the capacity and scalability requirements of
iBilling and its customers, but it also enables system availability
guarantees up to 99.975 percent within clustered environments. The
Starfire server - with its availability guarantee and workload/client
separation and security - comes as a single system to be configured into
multiple servers, enabling Application Service Providers (ASPs) to
control costs and reduce complexity while managing rapid growth.
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