Service Level Corporation (SLC) and NorthStar Software Solutions agreed to integrate the Ratchet Rating System with NorthStar’s Insite, which is their core product.

NorthStar’s service bureau operations receives the Ratchet Rating technology, as a reslt of this agreement, enabling support for triple-play services for all NorthStar’s client companies.

“Ratchet’s functions add carrier-grade rating services for telephony, wireless, SMS and data services. Integrating our software with Insite allows the 1.5 million subscribers served by NorthStar to transition to these new services.” says Carl Wright, SLC President. “We look forward to working with NorthStar as they deliver new services to their client companies.”

Ratchet Rating System delivers a double-barreled solution of rules-based rating with built-in data mediation facilities. Rules-based rating delivers flexible pricing and rating services to speed business change and rate plan development. Built-in data mediation adapts the rating processes to input and output formats from binary to AMA to XML without programming. Costs for interfacing to other systems disappear.

“Ratchet is the perfect fit for us. Both Ratchet and Insite have been developed using the latest Java technology allowing a seamless integration and user interface” says Josh Thackery, President of NorthStar Software Solutions. “By augmenting Insite with Ratchet, we can now offer a scaled set of solutions to our customers that want advanced rating functions without the full cost of an independent rating engine. We expect to use Ratchet to expand our service offerings to include rated products such as long distance, data usage and utility billing.”

About NorthStar Software Solutions

NorthStar Software Solutions is a leading developer of business support software. Founded by a group of experienced telecommunications professionals dedicated to providing the best business management software on the market today. The firm’s core product, Insite, is used to support more than 1.5 million subscribers across North America. Since it’s founding in 1994, NorthStar has remained at the forefront of customer management and billing within the converging video, voice and data market by providing easy-to-implement, robust, customer-centric solutions with proven cost savings and a rapid return on investment.

From subscriber acquisition through subscriber retention, NorthStar offers its clients solutions that handle all aspects of managing and cultivating relationships-throughout the lifecycle of a subscriber. Our next generation business support systems are designed to automate business processes and enable operators to bring new products and services to market more quickly, easily, and efficiently.

For more information, please visit their website: http://www.northstarssi.com

About Ratchet Rating System

Ratchet Rating System is an advanced telecommunications pricing and rating product designed to leverage a service provider’s infrastructure to higher performance and flexibility. It can operate as a stand-alone solution or integrate with existing service provider systems.

Employing a message based infrastructure, it easily integrates with existing legacy platforms and supports the parallel deployment of multiple rate engines to serve the needs of larger customers.

About Service Level Corporation

Service Level Corporation is the leading provider of pricing and rating technology for software vendors and systems integrators.

The team at Service Level Corporation (SLC ) has been delivering rating applications for more than twenty years. First as Lynn-Arthur Associates, then CableData Telecommunications and now as Service Level Corporation. SLC is the publisher of the internationally known Rating Matters newsletter, a clear and understandable guide to issues in billing and rating.

SLC’s Ratchet Rating System delivers the ability to directly process the “raw” data from your networks to rate/price transactions and deliver priced commercial transactions for your enterprise. This eliminates the money and time commonly spent on data conversion or bridging software when new rating software is deployed.

SLC is headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the home of the University of Michigan and a major research hub in the United States.

For more information, please visit their website: http://www.servicelevel.net/