With the addition of One-to-One Billing, the overall One-to-One solution will be a compelling choice for companies that want to incorporate E-billing into their online initiatives. The core system is particularly strong for building and running Web applications that exploit personalization and customer-relationship management strategies. One of BroadVision's other differentiators is its ability to integrate with alternative channels for delivery, notification, and interaction--including Web browsers, pagers, computer telephony, and automated voice recognition.

In its current form, the product is focused squarely at consumer-oriented direct billers. The solution lacks key tools important to consolidators, aggregators, and business-to-business billers. In particular, BroadVision provides no support for extracting billing data from existing systems. You'll have to rely on custom applications or third-party solutions to feed data into One-to-One.

BillDirect 1.7
Like BlueGill, Edocs is one of the most established vendors in the electronic bill presentment and payment market, and it offers an extremely strong out-of-the-box product to tackle the majority of the process. BillDirect handles just about everything, including bill design, data extraction, presentment, and payment integration.

In its latest version, BillDirect supports both Windows NT and Unix platforms. Architecturally, the core components for the BillDirect software are generic, with the Unix version using servlets and the Windows NT version using Microsoft's Distributed Component Object Model. Unfortunately, BillDirect's rules are not yet Enterprise JavaBeans-compliant, which will limit the system's ability to integrate in a standard fashion with Web application servers and middleware.

One of BillDirect's major strengths is its excellent visual development environment for creating dynamic bills and configuring data extraction. Another key differentiator is its simulator technology, which allows developers to quickly test data extraction and composition during development, identifying problems and errors.

Overall, the BillDirect system makes great sense for billers that want a robust system that is still simple enough for marketing personnel to develop business roles and participate in development. Technology, strategy, and proven execution from Edocs make the company a leader in the market.

BillCast 2.0
Just in Time's product, BillCast, is a packaged application that provides nearly all of the functionality required to implement an end-to-end solution, except data parsing and extraction. For this stage, customers must integrate the extraction tool of their choice into the BillCast environment. In the future, Just in Time plans to package third-party extraction tools with BillCast.

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