The Power of Session-based Pricing and 95th Percentile Billing

By: Eric Hernaez on February 22nd, 2012

As a new member of the NetSapiens team, I have been spending a lot of time discovering what makes us better than the competition.  This is the first of a series of blogs that will touch on our key differentiators.

If you are new to the NetSapiens solution, please spend a few minutes to review all the blogs in this series.

Session Pricing

One of the key differentiators between NetSapiens and other IP-PBX solutions in the service provider market is the NetSapiens licensing model.   Many platform vendors sell licenses (or subscriptions) on a per seat basis – meaning that you are charged for every end user that is registered to the system.  In contrast, NetSapiens uses session pricing that is designed to be usage-based.  That is, we license a set number of sessions that can be utilized by any number of end users (a 10 session license means that the system will allow up to 10 concurrent calls from any registered end user).

This allows our Customers to have the flexibility to explore different end-user pricing models and service packages to maximize subscribers on their network, because it is possible to optimize session utilization by over-subscription.   The bottom line for NetSapiens customers is the freedom and flexibility to come up with the right service offering for their market.

Universal Application License

Every session license gives you access to a high value application session that can provide many services to many end-users.  NetSapiens makes ALL applications available on the platform if you need them, at NO additional licensing cost. You can run multiple service offerings on the same platform and your underlying cost basis per concurrent session will remain unchanged.

95th Percentile Oversubscription

Another unique aspect of NetSapiens’ licensing is 95th percentile billing for sessions that exceed your available licenses.  We realize that call spikes are a normal and expected part of doing business.  Running out of capacity means blocked calls, irate customers, and lost revenue.  With other vendor’s solutions, being able to support end users on high volume calling days (such as Mother’s Day or Ramadan) usually means that your switch must be over provisioned.   The NetSapiens approach to this problem , called 95th percentile billing, accommodates peak calling periods without forcing you to pay for ‘spare’ capacity that lies fallow most of the time.

Using 95th percentile billing, NetSapiens will count your session usage whenever use exceeds the number of allowed sessions, and will bill on the 95th percentile of that group of samples.  For usage that is subject to 95th percentile billing, we will charge you for those sessions according to our licensing agreement.

As with all the NetSapiens differentiators, the goal of the 95th percentile method is to meet the needs of your business by allowing you to accommodate infrequent traffic patterns (the ones that happen 5% of the time) without forcing you to purchase session licenses outright.