Archive for the News Category

Previously talkRA reported how slip-ups by Bell Canada’s revenue assurance program actually resulted in the company overcharging its customers. Now the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission has issued its decision about what went wrong. The Commission confirmed that more than one customer was overbilled, although it was satisfied with the steps Bell Canada has taken to inform customers about the error and to reimburse them for it. You can read their full decision here.

My conclusion: sloppy revenue assurance cost Bell Canada a whole lot more than revenue leakage. They angered customers, damaged their reputation, and ended up spending a lot of money clearing up the mess they made. Of all functions, revenue assurance should take the lead and act with the utmost care and attention. Good RA is not just about boosting the bottom line – it is about setting an example for how everyone can run a better business. Bell Canada’s RA let their business down, and let the RA industry down too.

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US cost and revenue management vendor TEOCO is reportedly in talks to acquire Israeli service assurance firm TTI Telecom, according to Israeli journal Globes. You can read the Globes story here. On their corporate website, TTI admitted it is in talks with a potential buyer, but did not confirm its name.

Globes said the price tag would be in the range of USD 50-60 million. TEOCO should have the financial firepower; last year TEOCO raised USD 60mn by selling a minority stake.

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In a press release from mediation vendors Openet about their new BI and analytics offering, there is a tiny, almost casual reference to revenue assurance. In short, they hold out the prospect of doing a lot of things with data. Revenue assurance is just one of those things. Openet’s new offering is given in cooperation with Netezza. Given that we are talking about businesses that are expert in mediation and data warehousing respectively, they have the credibility when it comes to managing and using data. But for me, the real significance of this press release is two-fold. First, it says revenue assurance is just a small part of a bigger solution space for companies that know how to use data. Second, it says that anyone who knows how to use data can enter the RA market.

The niche RA vendors generally like to tell their shareholders about how they are expanding into bigger markets – moving on from RA to other things. That is all well and good, but if businesses can expand out of RA market, other businesses can expand in to the RA market. There may be more that follow Openet’s lead, resulting in a squeeze for existing RA vendors, just when many of them were hoping that market consolidation and economic recovery would finally help them to turn profitable. To my mind, two things could happen: the RA market could stay relatively well-defined, but become more crowded, or it could lost its identity, and become just an attribute of solutions sold in a less specific marketplace for BI and analytics. Either way, the conclusion will not be determined solely by the vendors, but more by the people who sign the cheques in telcos, and how they view their jobs.

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Indian revenue assurance vendor has announced the launch of a new solution for customer experience management (CEM). You can read the press release here.

This is a smart move by Connectiva. Instead of just picking through data to find things that are just wrong, why not also use data to better understand how customers behave? The press release hints that Connectiva already has several big telcos lined up as customers for their CEM offering. CEM is another name for what guys like David Leshem have been talking about for years – expanding the horizons of RA to get a real understanding what drives use and revenues. As a business, telcos are uniquely placed to understand their customers, because they have so much data about them. Problem is, they have so much data they do not know how to join it up and mine it. CEM aims to address that.

Rival RA vendors have each been going their own way, following different strategies for what comes next now that the RA market has plateaued. There is not much more that can be done to enhance the basic RA reconciliation proposition, making this crunch time as the vendors decide what their market strategy should be. This announcement tells us where Connectiva thinks their profits will lay in future. They may be right, and it will be interesting to see how many other RA software firms also expand into the CEM market.

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Israeli software vendor cVidya has appointed Ron Halpern to the position of Executive Vice President of Global Sales. Halpern was previously a Vice President of billing giants Amdocs. Read the cVidya press release here.

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This article from Light Reading reads like a comprehensive summary of all the recent events at Indian vendor Subex. Not much is new, but one snippet of information did catch my eye. Subash Menon, Subex boss and founder, is quoted as saying:

“In the long term, yes, we might look at acquisitions, but not in the next couple of years.”

Swallowing Syndesis gave Subex chronic indigestion and caused the investors quite a bit of heartburn. It comes as no surprise that Subex’s appetite for M&A is diminished. What is interesting is that Menon is sending a signal to everyone else. Subex got to where it is through a string of takeovers, but they are off the menu now. That leaves the market open for another firm to take the lead with consolidation. Which business will next stir up the mix?

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