The Innovation Hub, SA`s first internationally accredited science park in Pretoria, recently extended its world-class service offering to its "knowledge age" tenants by implementing the Galactrix billing solution from Unison Communications.
The Innovation Hub is a Blue IQ initiative and the facility features a hi-tech and knowledge-intensive community network. Blue IQ, the development arm of Gauteng`s Finance and Economic Affairs department, undertook this project to boost technological best practices, a culture of innovation and economic development in the province.
The Innovation Hub is building one of the country`s premier technologically advanced clusters, providing an environment for supportive development and cooperation between participating businesses which is not available elsewhere in the country, as well as linkages to a number of associated academic and research institutions.
While Telkom provided the voice and data lines to and from The Innovation Hub, the Cisco implementation within the facility required an enterprise billing platform to recover and allocate individual tenant communication costs. Unison Communications was chosen to implement its Galactrix solution, since its flexible and advanced billing platform was able to meet the demands of the high-tech communications infrastructure at The Innovation Hub.
"The new IP technology being used at The Innovation Hub necessitated a flexible billing solution," says Craig Young, MD of Unison Communications. "The Galactrix solution provides seamless billing to very different clients with very different communications needs on an individual basis, not as a collective."
The Innovation Hub lays claim to SA`s most advanced technological environment and infrastructure configuration, and Dr Neville Comins, CEO of The Innovation Hub, feels the Galactrix solution meets this standard.
"We`re very happy with the billing solution. Unison Communications delivered on deadline, and their consultants trained our administration personnel. They have also assisted with our first live billing run in March, which went smoothly."
The implementation of the Galactrix solution took three weeks, and allows The Innovation Hub`s accounts department to view tenant accounts and carry out administration through a simple and easy-to-use interface. The solution is also highly scalable, to deal with the planned future expansion of The Innovation Hub. Galactrix currently deals with 1 000 extensions, but within five years it is expected to handle the billing for approximately 12 000 users.
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