Revenue assurance vendor cVidya has announced they have completed the purchase of fellow Israeli business ECtel. You can read the announcement here. The merged business will operate under the name of cVidya. One sign that the old ECtel brand will be rapidly killed off is that the old ECtel website has already been taken down.
In an interesting spin on the story, the announcement emailed to customers said that:
The acquisition of ECtel positions cVidya as the leading global vendor in the Revenue Intelligence category, in terms of market share, revenues, installed base and product portfolio.
That is a pretty mighty claim. How do they know? Comparing product portfolios is pretty subjective, especially when you are talking about an arbitrary ‘category’ of products like Revenue Intelligence – a phrase I have not seen used before. Comparing market share and revenues can be objective, but you need data to do the comparison. An RA firm should understand that more than most. One of the problems with comparing RA vendors is that about half of them are privately owned, meaning they make no public announcements about revenues. cVidya fits into that category, and the delisting and acquisition of ECtel means ECtel’s numbers will no longer be public either. The public has never seen reports of cVidya’s annual sales or earnings so we cannot verify their claim. Then again, cVidya has not seen the comparative numbers for other privately-owned vendors, making me wonder how they decided they are the biggest. Even sifting through the figures that are reportedly publicly is difficult. The information reported may be abbreviated because the business is part of a group, or the vendor may have other revenue streams that complicate a like-for-like comparison.
This is not the first time the RA industry has seen contentious assertions about who is biggest. I have written before about how Subex and WeDo had competing claims to be the biggest revenue earners in RA. I concluded that post by saying Subex’s RA revenues were higher, if you counted fraud management as part of RA. Following that post, WeDo dropped me a line to say I should have excluded FMS from RA and then they would have come out on top. With cVidya now saying they are biggest, it will be interesting to see the response from the guys in Lisbon and Bangalore…
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