Nimbus Systems

Introduction
Stratus is a real-time convergent rating and billing platform designed to handle the demands of any customer or partner. The Stratus Suite can rate and bill anything from retail voice to complex revenue sharing contracts.

Stratus Suite fits into Business Support Systems architectures either as a stand-alone rating and billing solution or as a complement to an existing retail solution. In the latter case, mass residential customers stay in the existing platform allowing the protection of prior investment whilst capturing and increasing loyalty of profitable segments (such as partners or VIP accounts) with new and personalised offers.

Key Benefits

1.	Flexibility All aspects of the Stratus product are customisable to specific requirements. Off-the-shelf, Stratus offers enormously rich functionality, and this can be extended further through plug-ins, scripting and database extensions.
2.	Speed of implementation Stratus has demonstrated record implementation times. This translated into fast tangible benefits.
3.	Low Total Cost of Ownership Stratus is economical to acquire and by avoiding the ‘mushrooming’ effect of custom development around a black-box billing solution and is economical to evolve and to maintain.

Functional Strengths

1.	Service-independence Stratus is event based and can manage any type of billable entity.
2.	Real-time rating Stratus implements a powerful real-time rule-based engine able to price and accumulate any type of event based on any criteria. Stratus allows product managers to create and configure pricing plans and bundles through an intuitive user-interface.
3.	Arbitrarily complex customer hierarchies Stratus can model accounts of any complexity.
4.	Deal Management Stratus sets a new standard in partner management. The system has the ability to model agreements between any number of players. The relationship between partners is captured in a ‘Value Chain’ concept. The notion that a single event may affect several bills or settlement statements is native to Stratus, dispensing with the need to create dummy events for each partner in a value-chain. Stratus offers rule-based partner settlement, partner fraud management and web-based partner self-care.
5.	Flexible bill formats Stratus can produce bills or settlement reports in almost any format. In addition, any number of formats can be generated for a given customer so that a detailed bill may be accompanied by several summary reports or charts. Formats supported include Excel, PDF, HTML, XML and plain ASCII.
6.	Web access View Screenshot
7.	Powerful, rule-based Billing Stratus implements rule-based billing triggers. Billing triggers can be as simple as ‘first day of every month’ or more sophisticated such as ‘when threshold x reaches value y’ or ‘first day of every month except December when bill should be triggered on the 20th’, etc...
8.	Reconciliation B2B agreements can require reconciliation of billing information between partners. Stratus can receive internal and external events for any given bill or settlement statement and automatically reconcile them (in real-time, if necessary). Periodic status reports monitoring agreements can be produced based on reconciliation results.

Technical Strengths

1.	J2EE, 100% Java architecture; platform and database independent.
2.	Rich and intuitive web-based user-interface (support for customer and partner self-care).
3.	Easy integration thanks to XML API.
4.	Current uptime levels >99.99% in live tier-1 implementations.
5.	Pluggable architecture allows new functionality to be added without dependence on new releases.