Patent ID: 8094793

Claim:
A billing method, comprising: receiving customer usage information; and distributing service usage information associated with a plurality of customers to a plurality of billing processor platforms in substantially a billing cycle-independent manner, for being processed by the billing processor platforms; wherein the distribution allows distribution of end of cycle activities; wherein each of the billing processor platforms simultaneously handles processing for a plurality of different customers and a plurality of different billing cycles; wherein a rating partition identifier is associated with each of the customers, the rating partition identifier utilized for determining which one of the plurality of billing processor platforms handles the service usage information associated with each of the customers, wherein for each of the customers the rating partition identifier is used to replace a billing cycle of the customer in determining the one of the plurality of billing processor platforms that processes service usage information for the customer such that separation of the billing cycle of the customer from the rating partition enables distributed cycle deployments of an event processing system, where the customers with a same billing cycle are spread across the plurality of billing processor platforms; wherein the service usage information is stored in a central database shared among the billing processor platforms; wherein the end of cycle activities include processing performed only once during each of the billing cycles at an end of each of the billing cycles, and the distribution of the end of cycle activities includes distributing the end of cycle activities across multiple of the billing processor platforms, such that hardware requirements are reduced by preventing each of the billing processor platforms from requiring spare resources for handling the end of cycle activities as a result of the end of cycle activities not being distributed over the multiple billing processor platforms; wherein the plurality of customers are partitioned; wherein load balancing is performed by maintaining a balanced number of customers in each of a plurality of partitions; wherein an application program interface is utilized for moving at least one of the customers from a first one of the plurality of partitions to a second one of the plurality of partitions.