Mash-up or integrate?

MM: Could you go into a little bit there in terms of just as a quick footnote, how you do the mash-up or integrate with other systems?

ES: Sure. On the customer service side, here’s an example. We have a client that runs a game out of San Francisco. It’s a game in San Francisco. They have a call center in India and a call center in the Philippines.

Those customers there use our service to handle disputes around the billing aspect of it. They can turn things on and off.

We’ve also integrated with a piece of software called RightNow. I don’t know if you’re familiar with RightNow. RightNow is very good at managing the service elements.

On the telco side, if your phone’s broken or you’re in an area where a tower’s bad, our software doesn’t do a good job of tracking those types of issues from the service-provider’s aspect. But RightNow software does an excellent job of that.

They can tell that there might be a generic issue in this part of the network. Or there might be a generic issue with this type of thing being distributed that it doesn’t function well.

In the case of this game, when a customer signs up, we go to RightNow and we say, “Ed Sullivan—with this user profile—is a user of the game, and has entitlement to the server and has this plan set up.”

So if I call in for tech support relative to the service I’m using, they can answer my question. They can see if I’m entitled to the service, first of all. In this particular case, they have entitlement-based customer support. There’s a free version of the game, and then there’s a paid version of the game.

If you have the free version of the game, you can play the game, but you can’t get customer support. If you have the period version of the game, you can play the game. You can access an extended universe of the game, with more features and functionality. But you also get customer service.