The National Communication Authority (NCA) of Ghana has announced it will conduct revenue assurance audits based on CDRs provided by the country’s six telecoms operators; you can read more from ITWeb Africa. NCA’s motive is straightforward: they want to check the government is receiving all the tax that should be levied on international calls. Joshua Peprah, Director of Regulatory of Administration, showed the diplomatic skills we have all come to expect from a public servant:

“We are working with a consultant over a three-year period and the analysis we have done so far indicates that over the three years the state can make $200 million in taxes from inbound international calls…”

“…if the records a telco presents does not tally with our audit records the respective telco is in trouble.”

In other words, the regulator thinks the telcos are run by liars. It seems that nobody has told Mr. Peprah that some consultants are liars too.

This move by Ghana’s NCA links to their attempts to force the installation of real-time monitoring of international gateway switches, though this is being fought by operators. Similar arguments are taking place in Malawi, where customers are concerned about the dangers of Malawi’s regulator infringing their privacy. At least the Ghanaian regulator deserves some credit for realizing that you can do an audit before implementing real-time monitoring, though it remains to be seen if they will drop the real-time monitoring plans if the audit gives a clean bill of health to Ghana’s operators. However, Ghana’s operators are not just giving in. Vodafone Ghana’s Revenue Assurance and Risk Manager, Ashley Radcliffe, denied there was a need to install equipment that he said could interfere with quality of service and customer privacy. Radcliffe also said:

“As far as we are concerned, we check the number of minutes of international calls at several and various levels to ensure they are absolutely accurate before we present them to the NCA so we are not perturbed by any audit to be carried out by the regulator.”

Dan Baker, telecoms researcher and good friend to talkRA, has launched a hotly-anticipated online magazine, the Black Swan Telecom Journal, dedicated to the topic of business assurance. Packed full of content, the journal promises to concentrate on professional learning through case studies, how-to advice, and commentaries about industry trends and practices. Dan is stepping into a sizeable gap in the market, and I expect he will quickly attract a significant readership. Black Swan provides professional content from a wide range of authors, with the articles comparable to those you might find in medical or technical journals, though written in straightforward business language. As you would expect from a journal about business assurance, the articles cover revenue assurance, fraud, cost optimization, risk, analytics, security, and more besides. But do not take my word for it – I recommend you read the journal yourself, now available at bswan.org

The name Black Swan is taken from the title of Nassim Taleb’s book about the limits of knowledge, overconfidence in prediction, and the tendency to rationalize about the failures of data analysis and forecasting. I was thrilled when Dan asked me to contribute an article to his journal, and being a huge fan of Nassim Taleb myself, I could think of no better subject than to take Taleb’s maxims about robustness and give them a telecoms twist. My article, ‘From Risk to Robust’, can be found here.

WeDo, the Portuguese revenue assurance vendor, has announced the purchase of Connectiv Solutions, US providers of cost management and network efficiency tools; see the press release here. The purchase price was not disclosed.

Although details are limited, WeDo’s intentions are clear: they will consolidate their position as one of a few truly global players in the evolving business assurance market. Acquiring a US firm obviously strengthens WeDo’s foothold in North America – a region which is especially important but challenging. The idiosyncratic nature of North American telecoms has left many an international vendor perplexed about how to get traction in that vital part of the world, even whilst they find their software is selling well on every other continent. Connectiv’s website states their customers include 4 of the top 5 service providers in North America. WeDo’s top priority will be to increase sales to Connectiv’s existing customer base. We should also monitor how well WeDo can leverage Connectiv’s products for managing costs and efficiency; intelligent ways to reduce expenditures should be an attractive pitch for telcos in other saturated markets.

Every month sees new battles waged over who owns the intellectual property rights to new technologies. Now it seems like the the battleground might extend to revenue assurance. This April, US vendor FICO (the rebranded name of Fair Isaac Corporation) obtained a US patent for ‘revenue assurance analytics’; see here. The description of the patent is broad enough to raise questions about whether other vendors have established products which may infringe FICO’s patent. The patent covers such general activities as a two-feed reconciliation of data records, profile-driven metrics relating to reconciliation, and scoring the severity of issues found.

FICO’s revenue assurance analytics patent was originally filed in 2007, and the vendor has a track record of securing patent rights. Taking a look at the full list of their 69 patents, a number of them have implications for rivals in the revenue assurance and fraud management sphere. As well as several patents covering methods to detect fraud, I noticed this one regarding a ‘network assurance analytic system’. This patent begins by discussing causes of revenue leakage, and goes on to describe a system “configured to monitor telecommunications networks, detect errors or fraud in those telecommunications networks, and provide solutions to resolve the errors or reduce the fraud”.

It is relatively rare to see announcements from vendors relating to securing intellectual property rights for their products. With FICO establishing a track record in the long process of actively securing IPR, we could be heading for some very interesting and challenging times in the RA and FMS markets. It seems that FICO secured a head start on IPR whilst other firms were still enjoying the relative boom times for RA and FMS. Questions to now ponder include how FICO will exercise and defend their rights, and how other vendors will respond.

Official news about Connectiva continues to be notable by its absence, but the information leaked by an unofficial employee blog paints a grim picture for the Indian RA vendor. According to a recent post:

In a recently concluded meeting between top Mgmt of Connectiva and counterparts from “BIGGEST SI” of Connectiva in Delhi, its been agreed for sale of source code of Adapters and Parsers to “SI” in return to some part payments which are stuck…

Separately selling the code for parsers and adapters would beg serious questions about the company’s future. Although RA customers often place too much focus on the front end of RA software, industry insiders realize that parsers and adapters are the under-appreciated foundations of RA automation. Data must first be extracted and manipulated into a suitable format, before it cannot be analysed or reconciled. Software firms put considerable effort into developing the code for parsers and adapters, not least because these components tend to be the elements of any working solution which are most specific to the customer. A great front end is useless if the RA system cannot process the data taken from the customer’s OSS/BSS. Hence, as the unnamed Connectiva blogger points out, the parsers and adapters underpin Connectiva’s value proposition:

…how can anyone else buy the Company to help clear their dues, if part of the code is sold to one “SI” …considering Adapters and Parsers are heart and soul of any solution been deployed globally by Connectiva…What will happen to other users of the code, will they land up paying royalty to “SI”?

Another post on the site suggests that Connectiva customers are becoming disgruntled by a lack of communication from Connectiva’s management. The following is an extract alleged to be from a customer’s email to the blogger:

“While I am in constant touch with your company to understand the latest state of affairs and how far will this problem of Connectiva will continue, we hardly get any clear responses from the people on the call. Tired of listening to excuses and receiving project plans which are never adhered to from Acct Team, we forced Avi [Basu, Connectiva CEO] to join our calls, which has also not made much difference.”

Rival vendors WeDo recently said they expect the RA industry will undergo an “important reshuffle” in 2012, and hinted that they felt concerns about the viability of vendors would exert a growing influence over purchasing decisions – to WeDo’s benefit. Connectiva’s management team currently seems to have adopted the working rule that ‘no news is good news’, but uncertainty can also be damaging to business. As the unofficial Connectiva employee blog demonstrates, we live in era where rumours can spread at the speed of light. And other vendors may also suffer from falling confidence, if Connectiva’s difficulties lead customers to be more wary in general. 2012 is shaping up to be the year when RA really has to deliver on its promises, stop looking to the future, and demonstrates rewards in the present tense. ‘May you live in interesting times’ are the words of an old Chinese curse. For revenue assurance, the times are very interesting.

I introduced RevenuePad and the RA ‘clock’ in parts 1, 2 and 3 of this series. This is the conclusion of my series.

Epilogue: It’s time for Benjamin to follow and embrace natural growth.

In this final part, first let me explain, how RevenuePad enables ‘specific attention’ for RA teams all of whom may have different needs under the same problem areas. RevenuePad enables replicating the business structure of the organization, with an additional capability that allows custom monitoring for each and every business node beyond the quantitative parameters that RevenuePad already monitors. Let me take an example: Our hands have 5 fingers each, all of which are different with different capabilities, although they belong to the same ‘wrist’. Similarly, although the overall quantification parameters for all business nodes for an operator may be same, each node may have a specific need. RevenuePad allows creating and monitoring these custom metrics that uniquely identify and help gauge the situation at the business nodes. It is not necessary for the RA teams to use this capability for monitoring only performance of the node/nodes. As I mentioned earlier, RevenuePad has a framework approach. It is ‘this’ capability that would allow customizing the necessary information for the business.

The purpose of RevenuePad is to ensure productivity of the RA departments. We all accept that it is not the best format to have analysts’ spend 80% of their time to simple detect problems, and then try to fix the. The growth of telecom as a domain does not demand hard work, it demands ‘smart work’. It is time, analysts spend 20% of crucial time in knowing the 80% of the problems, so that the rest of the time can be spent for fixing the leakages and recovering the lost revenue. That is what takes time, and that is where a true RA functions would need to be. One of India’s greatest freedom fighters and ex-Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru said “Action to be effective must be directed to clearly conceived ends”. Hence for TEAM RA, its time to grow beyond the conventional approaches for working just to ensure that they do not face an identity crisis in trying to prove their merit. With the economic condition across the globe, it becomes even more imperative for RA to take up more than switch to bill reconciliations.

The need of the hour for Benjamin is to use his time-reversal clock to scale and grow, rather than wilt away.