Table of Contents

The starting point for the future of revenue, cost, and fraud assurance is meeting the new challenges of the telecom business.  And to learn where telecom is likely headed, TRI analyzes a revealing late 2010 Netcracker global opinion survey of 50 B/OSS leaders.  We also hear from Steve Cotton, Head of Revenue Management at TM Forum, on his analysis of mobile opportunities vis-à-vis over the top players.

While deploying and marketing great services is one way telecoms compete, another way is to be the low cost operator and “transform” the organization to become as efficient as possible.  In this chapter, transformation is discussed from different perspectives.

First we hear the advice of Hoosein Eslambolchi, the man most responsible for massively transforming the AT&T empire before it was acquired by SBC.  From a mid-tier carrier’s perspective, we also listen to the advice of Mike Irizarry following the recent transformation at his company, U.S. Cellular.

The mark of a good billing system is how well it supports the on-going conversation between telecom and customers.  Here we explain many key developments affecting billing, including the move towards greater merchandising products, and charging systems that manage promotions on their own.

We also look at what billing managers have to say about improving billing processes, the e-billing, enterprise business relationships, and system consolidation.  Finally, we illustrate why highly flexible billing systems are key to complex telco-to- enterprise and cloud services.

One of the drivers of telco revenue enhancement is driving customer care and support programs with the call center and other contact channels.

In this chapter, we summarize the advice of two global managers, Flavio Lang, the Customer Relationship Planning General Manager at Oi and Brian Brueckman, Senior Vice President of Direct to Customer at T-Mobile USA.  In addition, we feature an expert briefing on call center strategy from Robert Lamb, director of Contact Center Services at AT&T Consulting.

Once a boring back office function, order management is seeing a resurgence as telecoms drive greater coordination and personalized selling across call center, web, mobile store, and other channels.  In this chapter, John Konczal of IBM Sterling Commerce explains the details of how order management has become a competitive differentiator for savvy operators.

We also show how telcos are in a good position to leverage cloud, M2M, billing, and ordering skills to help enterprises in manufacturing industries, such as printing, turn products into services.

Revenue assurance investment is a key telco strategy for improving customer satisfaction and fixing control problems that cut across billing, ordering, provisioning and many other business functions.  This chapter sets the stage for our lengthy discussion of RA and discusses: definitions of RA, market drivers, lack of executive appreciation for RA’s role, and various measures of practice maturity.

Revenue assurance is an umbrella term that covers a host of audit techniques, based on a consistent set of business control practices and often a unified software and data platform.  This chapter captures the great of diversity in telco RA functions.  In fact, TRI’s aim in this chapter was to explain as many RA functions as we could find.

Closing out the chapter is an interesting analysis by WeDo’s Sergio Luis Silvestre on the reason why “business assurance” encompasses a broader vision of where RA and other telecom business control functions should be headed.

Organization issues are top of mind today as revenue assurance departments are pulled in to help solve many issues beyond their original charter.  In this area, experts are sounding the alarm about remaining true to the original mission of revenue assurance, even as RA software vendors expand to serve other telecom functions.

One expert is Güera Romo, a former RA manager out of South Africa, who has one a deep dive investigation of RA organizations as her Master’s thesis.  We also hear from GRAPA founder Rob Mattison’s advice about ensure the integrity of the relationship between IT and RA.

Revenue assurance software isn’t a “system” until the generic software and hardware is  teamed with a business process run by experienced analysts and users.  This chapter explores the human side of RA and draws perspective from two RA book authors.

First, Mark Yelland of RAAIIM advocates manning the RA team with “scientists” who are great at organizing and following rules and “artists” who are creative and love breaking outside boxes of rules.    Then Eric Priezkalns, editor of the talkRA website, explains  the origins of the RA profession, contrasts “big-data” and “process” RA analysis styles, and paints a lofty vision of what the RA profession can become as it evolves.

Our case studies in revenue assurance are valuable for understanding challenges, opportunities, and lessons learned.  Most of these studies contain helpful background slides to better show the accomplishments and obstacles in each case.  But what TRI believes to be most valuable here is one particular study, our detailed 10-page analysis of the RA program at Verizon Communications.

In the past two years, Verizon, a high practitioner of the RA art, has outspoken about its best practices at  industry conferences.  In this chapter, TRI combines the knowledge gained from several public forums together with material from TRI’s private interviews with Verizon.  The result is an in-depth look into Verizon’s: RA practices, philosophy, data-crunching and workflow systems, innovative “chase-the-bill” preventative RA methodology, challenges, and planned enhancements.

Carriers use each other’s pipes and complete each other’s calls. As a wholesaler you need to be sure you’re billing for all your usage.   As a retailer, your job is to verify the interconnect bills you receive.   The interconnect reconciliation and optimization side of business assurance is what we mean by cost assurance, and it’s practice that’s highly developed in North America and will soon spread globally.

This chapter merges knowledge from multiple experts.  Peter Yelle of Contact Telecom gives a briefing on invoice validation.    David West of Equinox talks about the jurisdiction and complexing rating process involved in CDR usage analysis.  Hulya Altinsoy from Connectiv Solutions advises on how to plan and cost assure free or subsidized international calling plans.

With the advent of SS7 and SIP based LCR, automation has truly arrived. Today, LCR is to bypass the painstaking switch updating process altogether by dipping a database on a dedicated server that call-by-call forwards the routing instructions to the switches in real-time.

Today, LCR and optimized routing is one of the critical innovations in cost assurance.  Our discussion includes a detailed LCR backgrounder from Pulse Networks, a SIP dynamic routing brief from GCS, and a discussion of the bountiful opportunities in international LCR from TEOCO.

Margin assurance for content services is a high revenue risk because a third party content provider gets paid whether the operator collect revenue or not.  This chapter explores the techniques being used to tighten controls and detect errors in this area.

A key feature of this chapter is a full explanation of the ground-breaking margin analysis system installed at CenturyLink/Qwest using a TEOCO platform. The system is a big-data-based enterprise-wide system that is a model for future cost/profit assurance.

Among other areas discussed in the chapter are the effect of promotions, “fine-grained” customer profitability, and taking advantage of volume discounts.  Other case studies include one on auditing wholesale bills for a RIM Blackberry service and BT’s interconnect partnering platform that smoothes its wholesale relationship with mobile operators in the UK.

Progress is being made in network inventory reconciliation.    That’s the word from Eric Nelson of Synaptitude (and former CLEC CEO), who believes adoption is being driven by the network groups who have been scolded for years over the high cost of their infrastructure.  In this chapter, the challenge of network reconciliation is explored and system solutions are offered from two directions.

First, Mark Nicholson, CTO of Subex, shows the virtues of network resource scanning and argues that the “configuration of the actual network is far more reliable than any representation of it.”  Then an opposite strategy is advocated by Suren Nathan of Razorsight who feels carriers – especially small to mid-sizes ones -- should reconcile using off-network systems such as ordering and billing.  It’s an interesting debate.  Either way, network reconciliation can pay big dividends in revenue maximization and operating efficiency.

Fraud management systems need to be as clever at pattern and anomaly detection as criminals are at exploiting the vulnerabilities of telecom networks and back-end systems.    It’s a never-ending struggle.  And this chapter attempts to define and explain the major control measures that operators put in place around a wide array of fraud management areas.

Several experts contributed to this chapter including David West on PBX fraud, Tal Eisner of cVidya on Insider Fraud, James Stewart of MACH on Roaming Fraud, and a director at Vodafone on Dealer and Commissions Fraud.

The persistence of mobile subscription fraud is a sure sign that credit management remains a key control function.  And if the key result of bad credit decisions is bad debt, well, Bell Canada’s informal research suggests that that at any particular time, about 30% to 40% of bills are either past due or unpaid.

In this chapter we discuss what carriers are doing to combat these credit and bad debt issues.    First we look a the systems that Fair Isaac and Neural Technologies have developed to manage credit problems.  Then we hear how a large carrier dramatically tamed its s bad debt problems through better collections processes, as opposed to buying a new billing system.

It’s crucial that operators and software vendors cooperate for their common benefit.  But the relationship is often fraught with controversy and missteps by both sides.  This chapter draws from a number of experts to seek answers to this issue.

First we hear from PwC on why RA software gets mixed reviews and why carriers require different data sampling strategies depending on the situation.  Then we discuss a problem raised by a carrier who complained about the lack of “leveraged expertise” and ready-to-roll KPIs that came with his RA solution.

David West of Equinox also analyzes the build vs. buy question and what good software customer service means.  Finally, Gary Beck of Beck Computers weighs in on the issue of making the software vendor/carrier partnership more solid.

Outsourcing revenue assurance and fraud monitoring to a service bureau is a growing trend – as either a hosted or fully managed service.  Companies such as Subex, Neural Technologies, and Connectiva are certainly all seeing an uptick.

In this chapter we explore the pros and cons of this issue, discussing for what geographic regions and  operator sizes an outsource strategy makes sense.  The section also concludes with timeless advice from Scott Rice, Senior VP at Sprint, who teaches how to manage a managed service provider.  In Rice’s case, one of those outsource partners is Amdocs.

While cloud computing, as an on-line computing trend, is in its infancy, Software as a Service (SaaS) has become a well-established trend in telecom solution delivery.

In this chapter we talk about the impact of cloud-based delivery in business assurance, such as the key advantages of SaaS and how the cloud is helping software vendors and carrier synchronize maintenance and software upgrades.  We conclude with an analysis by Peter Yelle of Contact Telecom on the benefits of SaaS in invoice validation and cost assurance.

In our 2001 study of the revenue assurance market, we made a point of covering the services market, but since that time we’ve focused mainly on the software solution business because that’s where a lot of the action was happening.

But in this study we bring our focus back into services/consulting practices by covering three major consulting firms: Ericsson, PwC, and TMNG.  In this chapter you’ll learn how the services firms add value, attract and cultivate clients, and decide whether to accept contingency work.

Mediation and usage analysis are the foundation of business assurance techniques, even as most mediation-specialty software companies have gone out of business or been purchased by larger firms. 

Of keen interest should be the detailed examniation of Sprint's multiple mediation explaining how Sprint manages its own internal mediation system in conjunction with that of Amdocs and Openet.

Network policy is gaining as a technique to promote services or throttle bandwidth in real-time for mobile voice/broadband users.  Promotional offers are tough enough to assure even for non-real-time services, so adding a real-time component has great potential to confuse subscribers and lead to churn and control problems.

Recognizing that RA solutions for network policy have still not arrived, this chapter provides a backgrounder on the impact of policy as seen by industry players such Volubill and Tango Telecom.

Analytics techniques and software are one of the big trends in telecom software and directly impacts the auditing, usage, and revenue monitoring functions of business assurance.  This chapter, based on a previously published TRI study on Customer Analytics, provides several case studies to show how telecoms are exploiting analytics.

Supplementing these cases is recent analysis from John Myers of Blue Buffalo Group on the impact that “big-data” analytics and BI is having in telecom,  In addition, Simon Rees, of Idiro analyzes the one of the newest trends, social network analysis.

The worlds of service assurance and revenue/cost assurance are beginning to intersect.  In fact, cost assurance market leader TEOCO recently acquired TTI, a pure-play network/service assurance software vendor.  When you can accurately measure the service quality a roaming or traffic termination partner delivers, you can negotiate better contracts and select the best partners, so the capability to leverage powerful cost management tools is there, though this advanced software is generally not yet available.

This chapter, which draws from TRI’s 2009 study of the Network/Service Assurance market provides essential background information on service assurance.  In addition, we hear the perspective of experts at companies offering service assurance solutions such as Nexus Telecom and Accanto Systems.

The telecom experts who monitor the fraud, revenue assurance and cost management problems are generally unaware of the systems and methods used to control the cyber threat, one of the biggest risks to the telecom business overall.  This chapter provides an up-to-date analysis of the threat and the kind of software solutions and techniques being used to counter the hacker problem.  This chapter was written by TRI’s network analyst, James Heath, and is a summary of findings from TRI’s in-depth 2010 research report on the subject.

TRI has also sized and forecasted the worldwide market for the telecom business, fraud, cost, and revenue assurance software market in this report.   The forecast model is based on several parameters: TRI's historical tracking of the OSS/BSS market; discussions with carrier experts; and interviews with software and services vendors.   The forecasts are delivered in Excel spreadsheets and uses 2011 as the base year and provides forecast numbers to year 2016.   The market breakouts are shown on on this page.

Analysis of the market and industry practices is contained throughout this report, but in this chapter, TRI pulls it all together to make final recommendations for carriers and solution companies.  We point to key trends across the business assurance landscape and point to opportunity areas that carriers and solutions vendors are not addressing.

Our vendor profiles are based on interviews with the leading solution vendors in the field.  TRI made a great effort to reach every major supplier in the marketplace.  We succeeded in having conversations with almost all vendors with a few exceptions.  All vendor profiles are new reports except Vertek and Telarix whose profiles we have republished from our 2009 report.

In the services space, major players such as Ericsson, PwC, and TMNG participated.  We also reached out to some small services firms such as RAAIIM and RevOps Consulting, who provided valuable perspective too.