Carphone Warehouse hopes to cash in after selling the intellectual property (IP) rights of its customer relationship management (CRM) billing system to partner Patni.

The underlying technology of the package, based on Tibco software, was sold to the supplier, and will now be brought to market.

“We will get a revenue share on sales and will also have the right to deploy any best practice investments made to the platform,” said Simon Post, chief technology officer at the retailer.

“If, for example, other users add mobile bundling we will inherit all of that, though we may choose not to use it as the changes may not benefit us or the deployment is too complex.”

A two-month “model office” period, which entailed testing and simulation with 9,000 live TalkTalk customer records entered onto the system has recently been completed. Further developments will allow the retailer to add all of its unbundled customers onto the system in the next six months.

The business has a “road map of new functionalities” that will be added to the system, with Patni working alongside Carphone under a building management service contract to ensure that any enhancements are fed into the retailer’s version and avoid any upgrade conflicts.

"We will be working with Patni to keep processes in synch and bring enhancements back to our version if they make changes and other people invest in it. What we want to avoid is the classic package problem of customisation that breaks upgrades,” said Post.