A Fully Hosted Enhanced Collaboration Solutions for Small and Medium Businesses
The Company
Headquartered in Kirkland, WA with employees and partners around the world, CoroWare Technologies offers a broad spectrum of customized customer-focused solutions, including enhanced collaboration solutions, professional services, business intelligence, and robotics.
The Product – Business Class HD Video Conferencing
CoroWare’s enhanced collaboration solutions include CoroCall Business Class HD Video Conferencing which is designed to allow any company to easily manage audio or video conferencing services. CoroCall HD Video Conferencing is based on the high definition Vidyo conferencing and enhanced collaboration platform. It is made available by CoroWare as a completely hosted solution which takes all the hard work out of providing a reliable and scalable communications backbone for small and medium sized businesses.
Image by Vidyo
The solution allows companies to save money and time by utilizing a fully hosted highly effective unified messaging and collaboration solution that eliminates travel, increases team productivity and delivers bottom line results for the company.
The Need
In order to offer its CoroCall services at extremely affordable prices and allow it to handle a growing number of customers efficiently, CoroWare knew it needed a billing and back-office 
subscription management system that would be both very flexible and scalable. One which could handle metered usage pricing, tiered pricing and one which would allow for full automation of the customer lifecycle - from automatic signups to customer self-service. In addition, CoroWare wanted something that would be easy to implement, but also had the ability to handle the pricing and packaging needs for CoroWare’s hosted CoroCall services and beyond.
Further, while CoroWare is offering its enhanced collaboration solutions directly to small and medium sized businesses, it also works with resellers who in turn utilize the hosted collaboration infrastructure to include similar services within their own offerings. A subscription management solution needed to be flexible enough to accommodate invoicing customers directly as well as extending the automation and invoicing capabilities to CoroWare’s resellers.
The Solution
CoroWare evaluated several SaaS subscription and usage billing vendors. With a need for a scalable, highly flexible solution that would allow for full automation of the customer lifecycle and match the pay-as-you-go pricing required for CoroCall and its other hosted communications services, CoroWare choose the Accumulus Subscription Commerce Platform. CoroWare Senior Project Manager Martin Harvey said “with extensive usage we needed a “Telco” like system but without the humungous complexity and cost. We were thrilled to discover that combining our own mediation capabilities with Accumulus we now have an automated orders, rating, billing, and invoicing solution.”-
The Accumulus Subscription Commerce Platform includes sophisticated recurring pricing modules which allow an organization to price their products in the way that is most effective for their business. It features back-office automation tools needed to fully automate the customer lifecycle and efficiently operate and evolve the business over time, including customer service, promotion and reseller tracking, recurring payment processing, automated invoicing, provisioning, reporting, and more.
The Implementation
The following diagram shows how CoroWare integrated and utilizes the cloud hosted software-as-a-service Accumulus Subscription Commerce Platform:
The Benefits
The benefits of CoroWare’s newly automated usage metering, billing, and back-office operations are many. Taking advantage of Accumulus’ customer lifecycle automation, the work required to sign up new customers, onboard them, invoice them, and keep them for the long haul has been eliminated completely or significantly reduced.
CoroWare can now create new subscription offers and promotions on the fly and easily engage new customers and resellers. Resellers are able to take advantage of the same kind of back-office automation that CoroWare has implemented which in turn is making them significantly more efficient as well.
With the help of the Accumulus Subscription Commerce Platform, CoroWare has aligned its business capabilities and operations for CoroCall and is poised to deliver high quality, affordable, and full featured unified communications to small and medium businesses everywhere.
About Accumulus
Founded in 2009, Accumulus addresses the complexities of subscription management and customer lifecycle processes that online companies face with subscription-based pricing models with its solution, called the Accumulus Subscription Commerce Platform. Accumulus’ cloud-based software-as-a-service solution includes subscription billing, customer lifecycle management and back-office automation tools. It easily integrates with customers’ existing IT infrastructure and online systems to help businesses manage and automate everything from customer sign-up and activation to billing and payment processing. It can be implemented in a matter of days or weeks and offers affordable pay-as-you-go pricing that is aligned with today’s cloud based business. Accumulus has anticipated all of the impediments that exist for software, service, and content companies moving to recurring revenue models.