Averum comes from the Latin word verum, meaning "truth." Many people seem to believe we tacked on the "A" in the beginning to mean "anti-truth," but we swear it was meant to convey "the path to truth." So what does that have to do with a billing system for ASPs? Pretty much nothing. We just liked the name.

Averum's founders have extensive experience in the Application Service Provider industry, both in building and managing ASPs as well as developing software for other ASPs. We have been working with/at ASPs in one form or another since 1996. So we have run into pretty much every billing-related issue you can imagine.

We got into the business of building a billing system for ASPs pretty much the same way Opsware (formerly LoudCloud) got into the business of managing web hosting environments. We realized that no matter what type of ASP we had either started in the past or built for our clients, we always ended up building the requisite billing module.

However, the simple billing modules never provided the necessary flexibility to manage our business as it grew. It was not unusual for our salespeople to want to offer a particular pricing deal to a customer, only to find that the billing module could not support it.

So we determined that what the ASP industry really needs is a billing system designed specifically for ASPs -- not one built for telecom companies or ISPs and then marketed to ASPs as just another market, but one actually designed from the ground up for ASPs.