The top team of Indian revenue assurance vendor Subex has been doing the public relations rounds recently. CEO Subash Menon gave an upbeat, but not very informative, interview to Indian newspaper The Hindu. What Menon says is less interesting than what he does not say. For example, he emphasizes strong revenue growth. However, after last year’s poor financial results, the priority for the company was identified to be a significant improvement in profitability, with only a modest revenue target. Indicating that the company will be ‘back in the black’ is a long way short of promising that original profit forecasts will be realized. There has to be a suspicion that Subex’s strong revenue growth is being bought at the expense of thin margins. You can read the interview here.

Meanwhile Subex CTO Mark Nicholson and Subex’s customer Verizon are all over this article about revenue assurance. There is nothing particularly new in the article, but once again we hear about Subex’s branding concept of the Revenue Operations Centre (ROC) as if it were the be-all and end-all of revenue assurance. A deeper insight would have highlighted the conflicts between the different visions for revenue assurance that are suggested elsewhere in the article. For example, the ROC is essentially the idea of revenue-assurance-as-monitoring, with people employed to sit at desks each day and respond to alarms when things go wrong. This does not fit particularly well with ideas that revenue assurance should be branching out into the analysis of product profitability. Assumptions and decisions about pricing points and margins may need to get reviewed from time to time, but not on a day-to-day basis, and not by the kinds of people who would work in a ROC. Even if such reviews do highlight problems, you would not respond to them in the same routine way that you might respond to an error in transaction data. Might the ROC, with its emphasis on routine data crunching, end up becoming a straitjacket that prevents Subex diversifying into more intelligent areas of business performance enhancement?

Irish mediation vendor Openet has announced the deployment of its revenue assurance solution in Nextel Brazil. Read the press release here.

Openet’s revenue assurance application is built upon their own Fusionworks mediation software. This raises some interesting questions about the boundaries of what can be described as revenue assurance, and how to measure the value it adds. If Openet’s RA application is doing no more than assuring mediation, it begs a question of why this is not considered intrinsic to mediation, instead of being treated as an add-on to it. If it assures more than mediation, how much more, and where are the handovers to other assurance solutions?

Neural Technologies, the UK-based fraud and revenue assurance vendor, has won an award from the British Computer Society, a professional body with over 65,000 members. Neural won the 2008 award for ‘Organizational Excellence’ in the category of ‘Large Technology Supplier’. Read Neural’s press release here. Neural won the award ahead of bigger and better-known nominees Sun Microsystems and IBM. For the full list of this year’s BCS awards winners, look here.

If services delivered by Internet Protocol are the future (and increasingly, the present) then it follows that revenue assurance testing will increasingly revolve around testing IP services too. The market for IP service testing is growing and growing. It is against this background that IPTV quality and service assurance vendor IneoQuest has filed a complaint against rival IP specialists Ixia. The allegation is that Ixia knowingly misappropriated from IneoQuest the technological basis for Ixia’s current video test and measurement solutions. They reportedly did this by abusing a 2004 NDA between the two firms. You can read the press release here.

I should send out reminders in advance, because, in all probability, you have forgotten to celebrate International Revenue Assurance Day (December 2nd). You might argue that there is no such thing as International Revenue Assurance Day, especially as it was the result of a unilateral decision I made two years ago. However, I can honestly say I have received no objections to that unilateral decision. In some quarters that would be interpreted as unanimous and unequivocal support ;)

I will not bore you with by detailing all the celebrations I personally have planned for today. It is sufficient to note that, as every year goes by, I feel that our fledgling black art of revenue assurance has grown up a little, and that is something worth celebrating. One day I hope to see our baby all grown, having turned from the exciting-new-buzzword-on-the-block into the mature, sober, sensible (and possibly boring) science it has the potential to be. Part of the reason I blog is to keep a record of its growth. Think of the blog posts as the metaphorical equivalent of a scrapbook – a record of events for a discipline that sometimes lacks a memory. This time last year I gave a summary of events in revenue assurance over the previous year. Today seems like a good day to say “happy RA!” and review what happened over the last twelve months…

December 2007
Gartner moves revenue assurance from ‘hype’ to ‘hot’ on their carrier hype cycles.

Subex rebrands, dropping Azure from its name and launching a data integrity service.

January 2008
Poor financial controls are cited as one of the reasons for the collapse of US firm InPhonic.

Data integrity issues cause trouble for UK telcos Virgin and Carphone Warehouse.

In the branding wars, WeDo’s rebranding exercise is a modest affair. Meanwhile, Subex runs adverts on television.

February
cVidya launches a new product to verify dealer commissions. About the same time, cVidya’s Chief Scientist, Gadi Solotorevsky, launches his own blog.

March
TMNG tries to broaden the appeal of revenue assurance outside of telecoms.

Papa Rob appoints his son as new membership czar for GRAPA. Meanwhile, an investigation into GRAPA membership numbers reveals that claims about membership activity are grossly exaggerated.

April
ECtel buys all the assets of Compwise in a US$1.3M deal.

UPC Ireland wins an award from ACL for the way they adapted ACL’s product to meet their revenue assurance needs.

Pakistan’s telecoms regulator reports that grey traffic costs Pakistan US$47M annually.

May
Razorsight is caught stealing the intellectual property of rivals TEOCO. The court case is settled with an order that Razorsight pay US$4.5M in compensation.

Subex announces big losses in their year end accounts. CEO Subash Menon describes it as “a disastrous year”.

The TM Forum finally approves the new Revenue Assurance Maturity Model.

June
The ceremony for the World Billing Awards is held in Amsterdam. Hugh Roberts presents the Award for Best RA Project to cVidya’s Eli Krakauer.

Employees of RA vendor ATS win an award from AT&T.

July
cVidya and BT’s Geoff Hammond prominently launch the World Revenue Assurance Forum. I blog about the legitimacy of some of the claims made, including that it is “by the operators, for the operators”. Without explanation, the World Revenue Assurance Forum disappears as suddenly and as unexpectedly as it appeared. BT will later boot me out over the incident.

August
talkRA is launched! Experts from all across the RA industry join talkRA’s team of authors, whilst my blog is migrated from its old home at revenueprotect.com. At almost the same time Morisso Taieb of Bezeq forms a new RA group on LinkedIn.

Telstra’s CEO praises the success the success of their platform migration and highlights the consistent RA metrics in the year end results call with stock analysts.

September
Connectiva secure another US$17M of VC funding.

Reliance Communications refer to enhancements of revenue assurance and fraud systems in their annual report.

October
TEOCO uses the money received from Razorsight’s settlement and buys LCR software vendor Vero.

ECtel launches its social network. The Integrated Revenue Management Alliance (IRMA) is a two-tier community, with some sections open to the public and others restricted to ECtel customers only.

Subex’s half-yearly results show a degree of turnaround, but include heavy exceptional losses.

November
GRAPA announces the launch of its professional certification program, and a membership vote on its standards.

Following the announcement of their Q3 figures, ECtel reduces its revenue guidance for the year.

That was a busy year for revenue assurance, with a real mix of good news and bad news. I am hoping, and expecting, that the next 12 months will be just as eventful.

This question is a follow on from the previous impossible mission question posted a few weeks ago.  One of the comments posted on the question asked whether the problem of un-linkable data was a Revenue Assurance issue? I think this is an interesting question and would like to hear other readers views before posting my own.