To manage Mobile OnAir, its mobile telephony offer aimed at airline companies, OnAir has chosen the world's leading provider of Pricing & Rating solutions, Highdeal. OnAir, created in 2005, is a subsidiary of a provider of IT solutions for the transporation industry, Airbus and SITA. To communicate just as easily in the air as on the ground, OnAir's services enable passengers to use their portable devices (mobile phones, laptops and PDAs) as well as the airplane's own equipment.

To create its information systems, including support for the company's complex, reconciliation functions offered by Highdeal Transactive, billing, business-critical processes, as well as advanced analysis and Business Intelligence functionalities, OnAir also chose, for this project, Bull. Air France and OnAir launched, in December 2007, the world's first inflight mobile communication service offer. Airbus A318 passengers can now send and receive text and multimedia messages as well as emails and since April 2008, they can also make inflight phone calls.

The Mobile OnAir offer is based on numerous partnerships with satellite bandwidth providers and business partners such as interconnection operators and airline companies, who are both OnAir customers and partners. Since passengers are seen as roamers on the OnAir network and as such, their mobile phone operators must pay a roaming fee to OnAir, the revenue generated by inflight communication is shared between the different companies involved. To calculate the percentages and manage the commission owed to airline companies, Highdeal Transactive is used. Partners can be commissioned according to usage, percentage, variations in volume or hourly time slots, as the commission rules are clearly defined in the pricing plan. Highdeal Transactive is also used for WebMail and WebChat, the billing of Internet Service installations, that are offered by OnAir for inflight access. Using the Highdeal Transactive software solution, the bandwidth service provided by Link OnAir will also be billed. It was Highdeal's proven track record for managing numerous partners as well as its flexibility in defining offers in a B2B context (one per client), that convinced OnAir to go ahead with this partnership.

Given that certain calculations are based on data from the aeronautics industry, OnAir was looking for a flexible pricing and billing solution that would allow it to manage commissions in an industry beyond the realm of 'classic telecommunications'.