Customer service pays its bills. But new software may eventually increase the number of clients Orcom bills.

Orcom said in a statement Monday it would partner with Soluziona USA, a division of one of Spain’s largest industrial and services groups, to develop the next generation of software for utility customer billing.

Bend-based Orcom, a provider of outsourced customer care and billing for utilities, hopes that the new generation of its customer information system will improve its service and allow it to reach out to larger clients.

The crucial difference between Orcom’s existing software, E-CIS, and the next generation is that E-CIS ”is an application that meets most of the needs of the majority of utilities in the marketplace,” said David Erickson, vice president of corporate strategy.

”The next generation software will meet all known needs.”

The original E-CIS software will continue to be marketed and improved, the company noted in a press release.

The new software will allow Orcom to market to tier-one and tier-two companies while reducing by 20 to 30 percent the operational costs of managing customer care in billing, Erickson said. These tiers include the largest utilities with millions of customers.

Orcom currently provides billing and customer service for about a dozen companies and 1.6 million monthly bills, which provide a source of recurrent revenue. If Orcom can deliver on the promise of the next-generation software, it could significantly expand its universe of potential clients and boost its monthly billings.

The deregulation of utilities through the 1990s created a disparate marketplace and an opportunity for Orcom. Once exclusively a software company pushing sales of products, Orcom management saw an opportunity to focus on outsourced customer service in a field of new players.

The partnership with Soluziona allows Orcom to continue to develop software without bearing all the costs while competing for larger customers. Erickson gave no timetable for completing the software.

Soluziona USA, a division of Union Fenosa of Spain, is an Internet technology developer primarily for the energy, financial, government and service-based industries.

Kevin Max can be reached at kmax@bendbulletin.com