Finally, expect vendors of electronic bill presentment and payment software to provide additional functionality for the needs of business-to-business E-billing. Business customers need specialized capabilities, such as the ability to re-sort and separate bills and their line items into discrete sections, allocate charges to specific cost centers within the business, route bills through formal approval processes, and take advantage of different payment schedules or discounts. Some software vendors have already begun adding such special features, and we expect the trend to gain some momentum as the business-to-consumer market matures and the vendors turn their attention toward the lucrative business-to-business market.

WorkOut Server
In September, Alysis acquired @Work Technologies and its WorkOut Server to enhance Alysis' line of E-commerce and one-to-one marketing technologies. The combination should prove to be a potent combination that exploits the potential for building customer relationships through billing channels. Initially, however, WorkOut Server exists in essentially the same form as @Work Technologies' offering.

The WorkOut Server engine has existed since 1995 as a solution to parse and render print streams from billing systems, and implement electronic data interchange and other structured data feeds. Adopted by service bureaus such as Pitney Bowes, WorkOut Server manages the biller-direct model well. Among the products we examined, WorkOut Server provides one of the most comprehensive solutions, relying on third-party providers for only the payment-processing component.

Large billers will enjoy many of the same benefits that garnered support among service bureaus. In particular, the solution, written in Java, implements a distributed architecture using Corba. As such, the product should scale well into very large systems. We were also impressed with the ease with which the Virtual Trainer module maps existing billing data streams into the WorkOut Server's schema. While the product makes mapping these data streams easy, it needs to support a wider range of data streams.

The WorkOut Server stores extracted indexes in an Oracle database that uses partitioning to improve performance and scalability. The bill detail data itself is stored in the XML format as compressed files. This storage approach should keep the database size manageable and scalable, but it requires the administrator to manage both the index database and bill storage. Archiving this data relies entirely on external solutions, as WorkOut Server lacks integration with any hierarchical storage-management tools.

While the process of constructing an electronic bill presentment and payment system with WorkOut Server was largely straightforward, the development environment proved a bit inflexible. The lack of an integrated debugging environment or any integration with third-party Web-application development environments is disappointing.

BlueGill Software Series 2.1
BlueGill is one of the leaders in the electronic bill presentment and payment software market. The company is well established, and has a number of customers already using its products. In addition, the company has a very strong partnership base, delivering its product through partners that include IBM and Xerox. BlueGill is particularly strong in terms of its applications for vertical markets such as insurance, telecommunications, financial services, and utilities.

From a software standpoint, the BlueGill Software Series is a complete product for both large billers and service bureaus. The base package sports a strong data extraction utility, which makes testing and debugging quicker by slicing data streams into manageable segments, and broad platform support, including AIX, HP-UX, Sun Solaris, and Windows NT (with IBM MVS, OS/390, and AS/400 support planned). BlueGill's architecture is designed to be scalable to handle very high volumes and unusually large bills, up to 200 Mbytes with more than 40,000 pages.

Overall, BlueGill offers one of the best off-the-shelf offerings available, and the product has improved in its latest version. For statement design and application infrastructure, BlueGill is open to integrating with Web application development tools and servers such as those from Bluestone or NetDynamics. Unfortunately, without Enterprise JavaBeans support, you may find your ability to integrate with standard Web application servers and middleware somewhat limited. Likewise, we'd like to see the enrollment process strengthen its hooks for LDAP export and tools for incremental capture of enrollees' demographic data.

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