Podcast: Play in new window | To download, right-click and save/download link

Geoff Ibbett is an independent consultant with tremendous experience in the field of revenue assurance. Over the years he has held a string of senior roles at businesses like Subex, Azure, Connexn and Telecomms Consultancy & Solutions. I asked Geoff to join me for podcast 7, and we talked about the new revenue assurance training and accreditation program Geoff has developed for the TM Forum. We also talked about his work on the TMF’s new leakage framework, as well as his views on trends in the RA software market and about the professionalization of RA. You can listen to this informative interview by playing or downloading the podcast from talkRA. Better still, subscribe to the podcast via iTunes, and you will never miss a future episode.

The first of the TMF’s RA training and accreditation courses will be held in London, England and runs from September 14th to September 16th. Geoff told me there are still some spaces left, so if you are interested in booking a spot, you can find out more by visiting the TMF’s website.

Sorry to everybody who uses Morisso Taieb’s wonderful LinkedIn group for people working in revenue assurance, but they will not be syndicating talkRA articles any more. It has nothing to do with Morisso, who is doing a great job and who immediately responded when I asked him to stop the republication of the talkRA RSS feed. Why did I ask Morisso to stop it? I have written previously how LinkedIn is a semi-closed environment; it takes content in from other sources, but gives none out. When LinkedIn first allowed their groups to syndicate RSS, it was done by publishing an excerpt and including a link to the full page. That was fine by me, as I noted at the time, even though the flow would never go the other way. However, LinkedIn did not stop there. They then changed the outbound links to show a special “LinkedIn” frame above the pages of other websites, encouraging users to discuss about the pages on LinkedIn. Hmmm… like websites devoted to discussion want all the comments about their content to end up on LinkedIn’s (closed) site instead of their own (open) pages. It is a cheek, and a kind of unwelcome advertising that LinkedIn is placing over the top of content that LinkedIn exploits for free. Their frame says the page below is “provided by LinkedIn”. Untrue. They had nothing to do with providing the content. They did not write the content. The content is provided using a web server that they did not pay for, and do not control. The same content is available to anybody in the world who goes to the right URL. So what is provided by LinkedIn? A link that points to it. And the person who types in the URL will be somebody like Morisso who added the one for talkRA to his group. What chutzpah for LinkedIn to claim they provided anything, other than providing themselves with a greedy way to profit from other people’s material.

The unwelcome advert - an ‘ActionBar’ in LinkedIn’s strange terminology - was plugged on LinkedIn’s own blog. After congratulating themselves, they added the following words:

As always – we look forward to and appreciate your feedback. Feel free to leave a comment on this blog…

So I did comment. My comment did not get published. It seems LinkedIn love to facilitate conversations on their site, unless they happen to be critical of LinkedIn’s business ethics. For those of you interested in the content that LinkedIn are not so keen to republish, here is my comment about the LinkedIn ‘ActionBar’:

Nice idea – if you run a greedy business that wants to steal content, traffic and life from other websites.

There must be thousands of websites, like mine, that offer the ability to discuss and comment on specific topics without adverts. They are not run for profit, and they do not look like the “news” examples you selectively show in your screenshots, but their RSS feeds on posts and comments can be syndicated by LinkedIn groups in just the same way. By syndicating the RSS feed into LinkedIn’s closed loop, you have a simple, crude but effective attempt to hijack the content of those sites. Adding a frame is just the next step in trying to keep LinkedIn users on LinkedIn – whilst greedily taking content from outside.

The content of the RSS feed and the content of my website is copyright. I never gave permission for it to be syndicated on LinkedIn, and I do not want it to be syndicated on LinkedIn. Taking a short excerpt and a pointer back to the source is reasonable, but then adding an ugly frame to advertise LinkedIn is going too far. Worse still, as others have noticed, the frame often seems to be screwed up. Nine out of ten viewers will assume the problem is with the original site, and not with LinkedIn’s clumsy attempts to grow its revenue streams.

If LinkedIn was an ethical business, we would see copyright holders having the facility to object to this kind of abuse, in the same way that intellectual property is protected on websites that allow people to post videos and music. Problem is, those protections are given to help big business stop abuse by little guys. This new issue with LinkedIn syndication is about protecting the rights of ordinary guys who are abused by a big business. Shame on LinkedIn.

Remember, this content is brought to you on a site that requires no registration and prints every point of view, without censorship. The authors on LinkedIn share their material, but they are not giving it away, and they retain copyright. The internet is here so we can share. People who take, but do not give back, are the enemies of a healthy, vibrant and free internet. Help us to keep the internet open, and not just open for business.

Anyone who has been reading my blogs long enough will know I occasionally dig up and share examples of how the phrase “revenue assurance”, and its concepts, are applied to quite different businesses. In the past I found relevant examples relating to airlines, the oil industry, software, and even government taxation. It has been hard to find good new examples worth sharing recently, not least because the phrase revenue assurance is increasingly used in North America as a cover-all term for any activity that might involve making more money. However, look here for a press release about a type of revenue assurance I have not seen before: preventing “piracy” in the supply of financial information services through activities like the sharing of accounts. The article also describes the loss as a “leakage”. The principle applies well. If two people use the account for the same information resource, the supplier makes half the revenue then if he sold two separate subscriptions, so it should implement checks to stop account sharing.

Though the idea is right, taking revenue assurance to its logical limit may ultimately have a downside. I guess it is only a matter of time before we start talking about “revenue assurance” to stop people sharing their newspapers…

In a perfect world, everybody would get one-to-one tuition that was tailored for their every need, whenever they received any kind of education. In this imperfect world, our kids go to classes where one teacher takes a lesson for many children, students may fill large halls to listen to the same lecturer, and lots of different people will read the same book to get the knowledge they need. In this imperfect world, what is common to good RA training, and what should every RA practitioner learn?

I started out writing this post as a response to Gadi Solotorevsky’s comment on Mike Willet’s excellent post about training. It grew and grew, so I decided it would be best to just include this as a new post! In short, Gadi wrote that good training is not ‘one size fits all’. I want to rebut that assertion, partly because I do not think that is what Mike was suggesting, but mostly because it fails to address a much more serious issue in RA training. The more serious problem with most RA training is not that it fails to be specific. RA training is often very specific, sometimes to the point of not being relevant to the student. The more serious problem with most RA training is that it is overly specific. By being over specific, and lacking any common and universal principles, it does not train practitioners to be versatile and to cope with the unfamiliar. Because revenue assurance is about dealing with problems that people did not even realize were there to begin with, we cannot train people to be good practitioners by only giving them skills relevant to a few problems we now know to anticipate. The good RA practitioner must be able to adapt their skills to the unanticipated too, and must learn how to find issues even when nobody else has anticipated they can occur.

If revenue assurance is anything, then the specific instances of revenue assurance must have something in common. Shakespeare makes a similar point about dogs, because dogs can be very different but still have something in common:

“… hounds and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs,
Shoughs, water-rugs, and demi-wolves are clept
All by the name of dogs.”

Good training will be based on what is common to every situation. This includes the situations that the student is not familiar with, and even includes the situations that nobody has experienced yet because they have not happened yet. Tailoring a course for your organization sounds efficient, but how useful is the course if your organization is changing? How long will its value persist? Even if tailored, the course must be based on principles that can be applied outside of the specific examples that are covered.

Universal principles, once understood, are more valuable to the student than lots of specific packets of unconnected knowledge. However, the clearest failing in the revenue assurance world is that lots of people know lots of things about lots of particular detail, but struggle with what is RA in general. Take them from their comfort zone, and they fail. Present them with a new problem, that requires skills they lack, and they run from it and search for an old problem they have solved many times before. This observation was one of the driving motivations for setting up talkRA - to force people out of their narrow silos, get them talking to each other, and make them realize that RA is bigger than the skillset and experiences of any individual person.

At core, any training should be based on universals. Practitioners have more valuable skills is they learn methods and techniques that can be applied to any situation, instead of learning how to do just one task. It is the same as the differences in how we might teach history. I can teach somebody history by making them memorize a list of dates and events. I can teach them a lot more history without mentioning a single date or event, if I teach them how to do their own research. If the student can do his own research, he can then find out the detail that he needs, when he needs it. The most valuable kind of training ensures universal principles are explained, and then made specific and relevant to the audience, depending on what kind of audience is receiving the training.

Unless specific training is consistent with universal principles, then two specific training courses simply do not teach the same thing. If you wrote an RA training course for one telco based on one set of principles, and wrote a second RA training course for another telco based on another set of principles, then you have no consistency in what you are saying RA is. They may both be good courses, but they cannot both be good revenue assurance courses. The better the underlying the principles used to create a course, the more universal the principles those are, the better the training is for the recipient. Why? Because the student will be able to reapply those principles to new situations, if their business changes or if they move to do the same job in another business. Otherwise, they will just need to be completely retaught every time the situation changes.

As per one of Mike’s examples, you can teach people to do a job a certain way, by training them which buttons to push and how to use some software. They can do that job perfectly well if they keep pushing the same buttons, even if they have no idea why they are doing it. Then swap them over to new software, a new company, or a new product to be assured. You have to train them to push new buttons, and the training begins right back as if they learned nothing before! Better that they understand what is common between the two scenarios. It is not just about being efficient with training, it is about developing people as people - encouraging them to think and be adaptable, teaching them principles they can observe and reapply, and not just to be mindless drones who need to be reprogrammed for every new task they are set. Of course, you can make more money by exploiting mindless drones: they will be made to pay over and over again for more and more training…

There is lots of bad training in RA, and we need to identify why. There are lots of people, with very limited experience, offering to teach people who work in situations that are very different from any they understand. There are also lots of people happy to be trained in a kind of RA where they just want to be told how to push the buttons, and not to think for themselves. Those people might do okay in their job, but they do not understand RA and will be little better than a complete novice when they change job. Worst of all, this sector is full of people who know how to do one thing, and then pretend that one thing is the same as RA, and is equally powerful and relevant to every business and every situation. They train other people to do that one thing, fooling them into thinking they now understand RA as well. As Abraham Maslow said:

If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

The good RA practitioner has many tools in the toolbox, knows how to use them, knows how to adapt them to be used in new and unfamiliar situations, and even knows how to make and adapt his own tools to fit the task. You cannot teach that by telling people how to bang the same nails over and over. You teach it from first principles. First, people need to understand why they are doing what they are doing. Then they need to understand the choices they have about how they do it, so they can pick the best tool for the job. That is what good RA training has in common.

Much is often made of the need and benefit of training to enhance the knowledge and skill of revenue assurance practitioners. The claims made of the benefits certainly vary considerably and, in recent times, there also seems an increased focused on accreditation or certification to prove that the student has the necessary skills. My blog is not about the content of varying and competing courses but some considerations that I recommend be thought of when evaluating different training options.

Firstly, technical training on how to use RA software tools is essential. There is little value in spending money on a tool that no one can use, or as is often the case, is not used to its full capability. No need for anything more on that.

We all know that it is people that use tools and need to apply their thought processes on the best way to achieve the outcomes that are expected of them.

Training in revenue assurance often seems centred around ensuring that the students have an adequate understanding of how a telecoms operator is “put together”. By this, I mean ensuring that the underlying technology and platforms are understood. This is certainly valuable but I suggest any RA training you undertake needs to go beyond this and if it is too weighted in this area, then it is more telco 101 than RA training.

RA training often discusses known leakage points and what to look for. It’s great to hear that operator ABC lost millions by $ by a wrong configuration but there’s a reasonable chance that the configuration is specific to that operator and not so relevant to you. Case studies are always of interest but for anyone other than absolute RA novices, we know how leakage can occur. Simply, we lose call/event records, we misalign services provisioned to those billed and/or we charge the wrong amount. Most leakages seem to be some variation of these. What you want training to do is improve your efficiency and effectiveness at finding revenue leakage.

So how can this be done? I don’t have all the answers but here’s some thoughts:

• ensure that the training encourages you to think about you own operational situation, as opposed to a generic model of a typical telco. For example, calls can be lost but what are the relevant systems in your organisation, what are they meant to do and what might go wrong. With that knowledge, you already have the start of a scoping document for some work.
• model what good RA work looks like -  how long should it take, how will precision be ensured, how is the programme managed, how are updates communicated, how are outputs prepared, what will be done to fix any identified leakages etc. This includes understanding what the challenges are to undertaking RA work, and highlight, very specifically, how these can be overcome.
• how do you define a programme to prioritise your efforts. We all know our companies are large and we could look everywhere but, depending on your priorities, where should we invest our time? For example, if you are chasing revenue, then generally, complexity and/or manual processes lead to the largest losses. Training should ensure you understand some of these principles and apply them to your situation - what is complexity to you (in the design, the build, in the implementation, in what CSRs are meant to do)?

To summarise, when you look at training options, be wary of training purporting to be RA when it may be on other subjects and seek out training that defines better how you can specifically improve the quality and quantity of your RA output.

Subash Menon, boss and founder of Subex, tried to make the best of the release of Subex’s year end results. There were many positives. The business failed to achieve its profits guidance for a second year in a row, but the underlying FY09 results were significantly better than they were in FY08. Costs have been brought under control by relocating more work to India. Revenues were up by 15% compared to the year before, at nearly US$121m. The business has recovered to a level which looks like it can sustainably deliver positive operating cashflows and profits. Although this level of profitability is far more modest than the expectations management set during Subex’s golden years, at least it shows that Subex’s core business strategy is viable. Over the year, increased sales in EMEA compensated for a fall in sales in APAC. Cash collection was very good, and the business had a strong fourth quarter.

Unfortunately for Subash Menon, there also seemed to be a dark cloud for every bright spot in the company’s performance. To begin with, Subex’s order book is significantly thinner than it was at the previous year end. Whilst orders for its revenue management products were roughly equal to the previous year, orders for its fulfillment systems were well down. Over the year, new fulfillment orders were down 38% compared to FY08, and in the final quarter they nearly flatlined, with just US$0.7m of FAS orders in Q409 compared to US$7m in Q408. Secondly, though not discussed during the investor’s call, Subex’s largest source of revenues is still the Global Services division of BT. Although there is no reason to believe BT will not honour its contract with Subex, it cannot be good for Subex to be earning a large proportion of its income from a business that is in crisis. BT Global is in deep trouble and needs radical surgery if it is to be saved. Given the uncertainties about BT Global, Subex needs to diversify its customer base and become less reliant on its biggest customer.

One disappointment that had to be discussed during the results call was the whopping US$40m write-down of exchange losses on Subex’s Foreign Currency Convertible Bonds (FCCBs). This exceptional item drowned the slim operating profit of US$6m. That said, Subex is not in the Forex business, and this loss is not a significant reflection on the health of its business. Taking a big hit this year may be a smart move, if it helps backers to stay focused on improvements in Subex’s fundamentals. By far the darkest cloud for Subex is the one hanging over its future, with the US$180m of FCCBs due for redemption in 2012. Even the most wildly optimistic predictions for Subex still lead to a black hole of uncertainty as to what will happen to the company as the FCCB due date nears. The slide in Subex’s share price means the FCCBs will not be converted into equity. Subex does not generate enough cash to be able to redeem the FCCBs. That is obvious, and Subash Menon did not attempt to hide the facts during the investor’s call:

if one were to look at cash flows for the next three years which is when the debt would be…the FCCBs would be due, we certainly would not have cash flows anywhere near what is required for [redeeming the] FCCBs, certainly not, we will be way behind…

That means Subex will have to make an alternative arrangement to cover the cash outflow when it becomes due. Unless Subex can find a buyer with big pockets, Subex will need to arrange new debt to replace the FCCBs. Even if Subex can borrow the amount needed, the outcome will almost certainly mean servicing higher interest payments. This in turn will leave much less free cash to reinvest in the business or to return to shareholders. This is a very serious problem and it is not going to go away. However, Subash Menon currently has no advice to give. During the results call, he repeated the same basic message, which was:

FCCB is still an open issue, I don’t have anything to share on that front. I do understand that that is a major concern from everybody…

The FCCBs hang over Subex’s future. As we get closer to 2012, more and more people will be asking about Subex’s plan to deal with them. Subash Menon has enjoyed many sunny days whilst he built his world-beating business. Now a monsoon is inching towards him. He needs to find a solution to divert it or to deal with it. Whatever answer he comes up with will determine Subex’s long-term future, or even whether it has one.

Mark Graham Brown wrote a succinct little business savvy book called Get It, Set It, Move It, Prove It. 60 Ways to Get Real Results in Your Organization. The book contains a number of short chapters neatly summarising basic business issues or mistakes made by organisations in its attempt to achieve its objectives.

One such chapter is on the use of benchmarking as a way of obtaining ideas for business improvement. Tongue in cheek, he refers to a benchmarking trip as an opportunity to go somewhere warm and fun while you tell your boss you are doing a benchmarking study.

The idea of a benchmarking study is that you get some great ideas for improving processes by studying other companies that perform with much greater efficiency or at a lower cost that you do. Benchmarking should then be a way of shortcutting process improvements by letting other companies do the trial and error until they hit on an approach that works.

While I read this book I looked for the application to Revenue Assurance. Brown lists a few shortcomings of benchmarking which I believe are equally valid in our industry and it would be interesting to hear what our readers, who have participated in the TMF and GRAPA benchmarking studies, think about these common shortcomings in the context of furthering the RA standardisation effort.

• Well run businesses are inundated with requests to do benchmarking, so much so that one particular car manufacturer started asking money for benchmarking tours and ended up making more money from the tours than from manufacturing cars;
• Many companies who add themselves to the benchmarking databases are a legend in their own minds only. They volunteer information to others but are actually so outdated and generic that it is a total waste of time to review what they have to offer;
• A lack of focus and preparation. Benchmarking should focus on a singular goal and process. Once the process has been identified, a plan for selected the comparison data should be done. The outcome of an unplanned benchmarking study would not contribute to the organisational learning as you would realise after the field trip that you miss vital info or may even have selected an inappropriate partner against which to benchmark;
• Thinking that you have to benchmark again a large and well known company instead of a small company that actually do things differently.

When I read benchmarking reports I do not always understand what was benchmarked. I would think that we would like to take X and compare it against a number of sources to determine if X looks and feels the same when compared to others. I can see from the benchmarking questions that X is implied but it is not explicitly stated or described/labeled as X.

What is the expected benefit of being benchmarked? Many companies are looking for the perfect role model against which to benchmark themselves in the hope that they would learn how to do the job. Very often they do not have an idea what should be done and how. The exercise is seen more as a hunt for free advise, templates and how to. If they find a company against which to compare themselves, what benefit is there to the comparison company and how many companies end up training or guiding the benchmarking company? Is this still considered benchmarking?

Podcast: Play in new window | To download, right-click and save/download link

Lee Scargall, fellow talkRA author and Director of Enterprise Risk Management at Qtel International, joined me for podcast 6. We talked about a topic of increasing importance: how to deliver revenue assurance across international groups. Fewer and fewer telcos are run as stand-alone entities. Economies of scale has made it harder and harder for small national telcos to match the profits of large international groups. Cost reductions and efficiency savings increasingly drive groups to build scale by expanding overseas. At the same time, group-level executives see revenue assurance as vital to ensuring shareholder value is maximized in each national operation. I cannot think of anyone better placed to give advice on revenue assurance in groups. Lee was recruited to Qtel, the Qatari operator with ambitious plans for growth and international expansion, and tasked to implement their group function for risk management, revenue assurance and fraud management. He joined them after performing a similar role across the disparate overseas subsidiaries of Cable & Wireless. You can hear Lee’s frank advice about how to manage group revenue assurance by listening or downloading the podcast from talkRA. You can also hear and subscribe to the podcast using iTunes, meaning all future episodes will be downloaded as soon as they are available.

Walk around Britain today, and you sometimes see old houses with recesses in the walls. They look like they should have windows in them, except there is no window. The space is the right size, and in the right place for a window, but they are bricked up. They are reminders of a time when Britain had a ‘window tax’, a tax where the wealth of a man was measured by the number of windows in his house. You can imagine the kind of reaction that provoked, with two small windows costing double one big window. Governments are always looking for different ways to tax the people. At one time, the Russian state generated 40% of its revenues from a tax on vodka. Public toilets in France, Italy and Romania are still named after Roman Emperor Vespasian, who taxed the collection of urine. There are still many stupid taxes today. Almost half of the states in the US have laws to make people pay tax on illegal drugs. Not surprisingly, most illegal drug users also dodge the drug taxes too. A few weeks ago, talkRA colleague Lee Scargall reported on a crazy suggestion to introduce a tax on SMS messages in the UK. I laughed it off, but I laughed too soon. Although there is no signs that such a bonkers tax will be levied in the UK, there is a serious proposal to introduce just such a tax in the Philippines.

Of course, the Philippine authorities are trying not to call it a tax. It will be a ‘fee’ of perhaps 5 centavos (about 1 US cent) per text. The fee will be used to pay US$30 million for metering devices, to check that the Philippines government is getting all their money. You can read about the story here, here, here and here.

The Philippines are the highest per capita users of SMS in the world, so a penny a text must seem like a great way to raise cash for the government. With US$30m at stake, there must be some vendors out there willing to tell the Philippine authorities what a good idea the scheme is, and how they are right not to trust the telcos. US$30m does not sound like the kind of number picked at random either, so somebody must have had a few sly conversations with possible suppliers. Money talks, but whoever is whispering sweet nothings about extra money from telcos, the Philippine government should turn a deaf ear.

The window tax was a bad tax, even though it was simple. That is why we no longer have it. It tried to make money from the richest, but counting windows is a poor way to work out who is richest. The same criticism applies to this text tax. If the Philippine government wants to tax telcos more, then they can just pass a law and take more of their profits. Taking money direct from revenues just ducks the question of how those revenues should be spent. The Philippines benefits more in the long-run if the telcos invested in infrastructure and services. The employees of telcos benefit if they are paid well and have job security. Profits come after costs like investments and the pay received by staff. Taxing profits does not punish businesses that invest or reward their staff well. Taxing revenues does. Taxing revenues is short-sighted, and discourages expenditure on infrastructure and on employees. One way or another, telcos who carry an extra tax burden will either charge the consumer more to compensate, or they will spend less on providing current and future services, or they will generate smaller profits. If customers end up paying more, then the text fee will be an extra stealth tax on them. If investment or pay falls, that hurts customers and the economy too. And if profits fall, then you end up in exactly the position you would have been in if you had just put a bigger tax on profits to begin with, except you wasted US$30m on a lot of extra technology to do it.

In the end, the only sure-fire winners in the Philippine scheme would be overseas. An overseas business will get the contract, because the technology will need to be imported. Whichever supplier wins the deal, the taxman in their country will be taking his slice. But back in the Philippines, somebody is paying for a lot of unnecessary equipment.

Despite the recent crisis, there is only one sensible place for governments to be looking for money, and that is in banks. Whether a telco makes money from SMS messages, voice or from the food sold in the staff canteen, that money ends up somewhere. Audit the company’s numbers, trace the money, take what is owed - that is how a tax system should work. Money comes out of the telco customer’s pocket and ends up in a bank somewhere. It does not just disappear. Looking for that money by poking around a telecoms network or interrogating a database would mean asking the taxman to run the telecoms business, instead of just taxing it. A good telco will turn all its network usage into money, and the taxman will take his share of the money. A bad telco will fail to turn all its network usage into money, meaning there is less money for the taxman too. But the taxman is not going to help himself by trying to interfere in a failing business. Even a greedy taxman is never going to be better at running a business than a greedy businessman. And even if the taxman did help the telco to make more money, it would be because customers were previously underbilled, or because the telco was engaged in fraud. If customers were underbilled, then the result is that customers will pay more, which is exactly what the politicians are promising will not happen. On the other hand, if the problem is internal fraud within, or by, the telco, then network data will not help. Any good RA practitioner should know you do not find hidden cash by trying to do a usage reconciliation - you do it by tracing cashflows. Trying to reconcile cash to usage would be a massive (and probably inconclusive) distraction from the real goal. Usage reconciliations are good for finding leakages nobody knows about, not for finding cases where real money is being hidden. A good auditor does not need to know about a customer’s usage just to tell if the money the customer spent has gone missing within the business being audited.

The text tax is a sneak attack - a confused and confusing attempt to raise taxes whilst pretending that nobody has to pay for them. Either it steals from customers whilst hiding behind the telco, or it involves governments invading telcos and telling them how to run their businesses. Neither is a credible or sensible way to increase public funds. It is a bad idea all round, and is seemingly inspired by a lot of confusion between the principles of auditing cashflow (something the taxman has a reasonable right to ask questions about) and auditing business performance (definitely not the job of the taxman in a free society).

Thankfully, it looks like the Philippine customers are less easily confused than the Philippine authorities. It is reported that consumer groups are angry at the proposal. Good for them. That stands as proof that you do not need to spend US$30m just to understand what is really going on…

A few weeks ago we reported that Israeli revenue assurance vendors cVidya had secured a new US$5m credit line from venture lenders Plenus. Now it seems like cVidya might be looking for more venture capital funding. The Israeli Venture Association’s High-Tech conference is an event where technology businesses get to network with potential VC backers. The 2009 event is scheduled for May 19, and according to the program, cVidya will be presenting. Good luck to them - it would be interesting to see what they use the money for…