It has been a while since I last poked fun at Papa Rob Mattison, the self-appointed Grand Wizard of Revenue Assurance. In general I try to ignore him, but then he does something that just boggles the imagination…
EricEric Priezkalns is one of the editors and founders of talkRA.com. He is an Assistant Director at Qtel International, responsible for enterprise risk management. Eric has over ten years of telecommunications industry experience in risk management and revenue assurance. In a recent podcast, Mark Yelland and I talked about Mark’s concept of the five dimensions of revenue assurance. During the interview, Mark mentioned that his new book with David Sherick, ‘Revenue Assurance for Service Providers’, would be coming out in hardback soon. The good news is that the hardback version is now available. You can buy it from AuthorsOnLine, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com. The TM Forum has issued a new report on revenue assurance, entitled ‘Revenue Assurance: The Hidden Opportunity’. The report is the sixth in their ‘insights business intelligence’ series and builds upon the data they obtained from their industry-wide revenue assurance benchmarking exercises. The report is available from here and is free to members of the TMF. I have been digesting the report’s findings over January; read on for my review. Although I am a European, I am glad to see that an ambitious Indian businessman can take on the rest of the world and be a success. There should be no geographic barriers to talented entrepreneurs. The turnaround of Subex shows Subash Menon, Subex’s founder and boss, still deserves to be ranked in the top league of self-made businessmen. If you had asked me a year ago, I might have questioned if Menon would still be at the head of the business he created. When things turn sour, heads roll, and even the man who gave his name to the business can become dispensable. Menon kept his head during the dark times, and we can now see the results. Subash Menon established himself to be pioneer of the Indian software business. Not content to buy up small firms, he was prepared to set his sights higher and look for big deals overseas. Subex’s purchase of British firm Azure was a success. Subex’s purchase of Canadian firm Syndesis was not. It would be a shame to see a success story like Subex ended by one big miscalculation, so it is a relief to see the business is getting over the indigestion caused by swallowing the overpriced Syndesis. In the past, I have been keen to look past the upbeat stories about Subex and examine the less than healthy fundamentals following the acquisition of Syndesis. Now, the situation is reversed. Not enough credit is given to Subex’s management for slimming their business down and getting it into shape. For me, the most telling sign that Subex keeps moving in the right direction comes from the ratio of EBITDA to revenues. Take a look at the trend revealed by these figures:
If you want to read more about the story of Subex’s revival, I recommended you look at this article from livemint.com. In it, we hear Subash Menon say his firm had ‘fallen off the cliff’ after the purchase of Syndesis. Most tellingly, he pinpoints the mistake of financing the purchase using debt instead of equity. In his words:
It takes a big man to make a big mistake, fix it, and admit to it. After falling off the cliff, Subex is now climbing back up it. Having survived their fall into the abyss, Subex and Subash Menon are set to get right back on top. Following their merger with fellow Israeli RA vendor ECtel, cVidya announced they would be
I blogged straight away about the difficulty of verifying cVidya’s claim, highlighting in particular that rivals WeDo and Subex might claim to be the top revenue earners in the sector. cVidya’s figures are not publicly reported, so that is where I thought the story would end. However, Israeli business news outfit Globes has once again let slip some useful information about Israel’s revenue assurance companies. In the Globes story about cVidya’s purchase of ECtel, they reported (more…) The leaner, meaner Subex has posted good results for Q3. A while ago, Subex press releases liked to talk about the top line, not the bottom line. Now the focus has reversed. The leaner Subex looks like its annual revenues will be much closer to USD100m than the USD120m+ that had been its forecast only a few years ago. But now that Subex has a much lower cost base, profits and EBITDA have rejuvenated. In Q3 Subex made a profit after tax of USD 8.7m over sales of USD 25.1m. With Subex’s management saying they have resolved their FCC overhang, they can look forward with increased confidence thanks to their strong fundamentals. |
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