telecom cost management

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AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2011
V O L U M E
1 3 I S S U E
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ISSN 1745-1736
DRIVING PROFITS FOR EMEA'S COMMUNICATION
SERV
TALKING
HEADS
CSPs must move beyondfighting known
revenuerisks to attacking the
unknowns of their operations,says cVidya CEO
HYBRID BILLING
The best means ofapproach or theworst
compromise?
REVENUE
MANAGEMENT
Scattered data masksrevenue potential
CUSTOMER
CLOCKING OFF!?
EXPERIENCE
A watchdog withmore bark thanbite, inside
Happy customersreplace green lightsas the KPI
TalkTalk's 3mOfcom
UNIFIED APM?
fine
Time to tidy upthe applicationperformancemanage
menttoolbox
Comptel makes
12m in two years from Axiom Systems acquisition
The NEPs are coming, should we worry?
Vodafone Iceland,
Tunisiana and Turkcell make vendor selections
Dates for your Diary
2
T A L K I N G H E A D S
CSPs must movefrom simply
addressing
known revenue
risks to attackingthe unknowns oftheir
operations
Alon Aginsky is CEO and president of cVidya
Networks, the provider of revenue
intelligence solutions for telecom, media and
entertainment service providers that he
established 10 years ago. Prior to cVidya,
Aginsky served as vice president of
businessdevelopment and business alliances at C.
Mer Industries, where he was responsible fornew
ventures in telecoms customer care, billing, and
network management solutions.Aginsky holds a BA
in Business Administration from New York
Technology University andalso helps young
startups grow and prosper. Here he shares his
view of the newrevenue intelligence challenges
with VanillaPlus.
VanillaPlus Alon, cVidya has now been inthe
industry for 10 years, with over 150global
clients, including 20 of the largestoperators in
the world. How did you gethere?
diverse revenue channels, needed the ability
tocontrol these channels and prevent leakage. I
wanted to create a business that would provide
awin-win offering. My vision was to establish
cVidya as a company that would enablebusinesses
to achieve a high ROI from oursolutions that we
would actually save the
Alon Aginsky When I founded cVidya in 2001,
Iknew that we were entering into an industry
thatwould keep growing and where customers
customer money through engaging us and thatthey
would be capable to optimise and generatenew
profitable streams once revenues are
needs would keep evolving. Back then we
sawbusinesses were trying to manage their
valuechains efficiently but were lacking the
expertise
assured. However first we needed to educate
themarket that such solutions were possible to
to address these needs. Businesses were in
needof products, solutions and consultants that
couldprovide much needed support and whose
benefitwould far offset their cost.
implement and actually work.
VP As operators offer more and morecomplex
services and the value chainbecomes more
distributed, how has the
Ive always had an entrepreneurial streak and
Iknew that communication service
providers(CSPs), with their incredibly advanced
and
revenue assurance challenge intensified?What
specific challenges are CSPs lookingto overcome
right now?
VANILLAPLUS AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2011 13
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T A L K I N G H E A D S
Revenue assurance and fraud used to
AA Each operator tries to keep winning
newbusiness and retaining existing customers
byoffering advanced services or enhancements
toexisting ones. Each time this occurs, the
valuechain becomes more distributed and
complex,and so the need for revenue intelligence
fraud solutions, mainly using one-off
consultingservices, but the requirement for the
market is
for ongoing consulting capabilities to support
theproactive approach. cVidya is the first in
the
be mostly reactive, focusing on the
industry to embed risk managementmethodology
into its solutions. We will berevolutionising
the industry by enablingoperators to easily
identify targeted risks andknow exactly what
threats will arise. We will alsobe enabling the
RA, fraud and pricing specialiststo benefit from
an easy adoption of thismethodology in their
day-to-day operationsthrough wizards and built
in support within theproducts.
known knowns.While this approachproved itself
as veryeffective resulting in
solutions grows. Some of the major issues
andchallenges were addressing for operators
todayrelate to business intelligence with
regards topricing analytics. Whether its for a
customer
threatening to leave unless they are offered
abetter package or service, or a large
corporation
looking to source new services, CSPs need to
beable to ascertain instantly what price or
servicesthey need to offer in order to retain
the profitablecustomers or win a lucrative
contract. Pricing
significant financial recompense, itseffect on
preventing
Another trend we will see increasing is
fraudconducted through social media channels.
Fraudis one of the major concerns of CSPs
andfraudsters themselves will always try and be
onestep ahead of a company. The dramatic
growthof social networks around the internet
world hasbrought us to the understanding that
theinformation and data accumulated within
thesenetworks can be highly beneficial to
fraudinvestigation processes. With
virtuallyeverything going on in or around the
internet,fraudsters and their peers also act
within, andmanipulate for their criminal intent,
thesurrounding social networks. Embedding
socialnetworks, like Facebook, as an integrated
tooland source of information to the
fraudmanagement system is something that
helpsfraud investigators in their search for
relevantand useful information to uncover new
fraudscenarios and trends.
analytics across the board is a key issue for
CSPsas they look for new sources of revenues
that arenot coming from new subscribers or
service
leakages was limited.
launches, but from innovative bundles
andpackages to attract existing and new users.
Thesolutions that enable the operators to
identify theimpact on pricing and provide
recommendationsfor tailored pricing per
subscriber are keydifferentiators.
Another challenge that CSPs face is
internalfraud, which is fraud that occurs from
within
their own organisations. We did a poll last
yearand 85 of CSPs felt that internal fraud was
a
growing concern. Internal fraud can range
froman employee fixing bills for their friends
or familyto large scale financial fraud. CSPs
were not
always in a position to catch these fraudsters
andwould rely on word of mouth or other tactics.
Our solutions come with dashboards
designedspecifically for identifying these
issues.
VP In terms of new business and deliverymodels
- cloud computing seems to be topof mind, what
is your perspective on howcloud computing will
change our industry?
VP Where do you feel the RevenueIntelligence
domain is heading over thenext few years?
AA Yes, cloud computing is definitely one of
theexciting technology and business model shifts
inrecent years. For the communications industry
ithas two main implications. The first
implicationis that service providers are
themselves
AA In the past revenue assurance (RA) andfraud
used to be mostly reactive, focusing on
theknown knowns. While this approach
proveditself as very effective resulting in
significantfinancial recompense, its effect on
preventingleakages was limited. In practice, the
percentageof the recovery of detected leakage is
far frombeing 100, mainly due to
commercialconsiderations that limited the amount
of backbilling. Hence the industry needed to
becomemore proactive, and prevent the leakages.
This isexactly the benefit of adopting and
adaptingwell-established risk management
becoming cloud service providers. This
allowsthem to move up the value chain to offer
IT
services - in order to reduce churn,
increaseARPU and ultimately avoid becoming
dumbpipes. Service providers who will thrive in
thisnew era are those who will offer hundreds
andeven thousands of ever changing
applicationsdelivered with innovative pricing
models and
over a complex value chain. This is
challengingfrom a number of aspects and
monetisation inparticular - namely billing for
these services andpreventing fraud and other
revenue leakages. Toaddress these issues, cVidya
launched IRIS forCloud Services earlier this
year - a solution
methodologies into the RA and fraud world.
Wemanaged to set standards in the industry
through our CTOs leadership of the RISKconcept
in the TM Forum, incorporating RiskManagement
methodologies into its RevenueIntelligence
solutions. Our solutions enable CLevel
management to deploy a top-down view oftheir
business and proven revenue protectionmethods
enabling them to benefit from clearstrategic
planning and ongoing processes toachieve the set
targets.
addressed at tackling the specific challenges
thatservice providers offering cloud services
face
when they want to assure their cloud
servicesmargins. The second implication is that
service
providers are also becoming consumers of
cloudservices. We see more and more BSS/OSS
applications starting to move to the cloud,
andwhile cloud computing is still in its early
Currently, we see operators utilising
consultingservices when initially deploying the
RA and
adoption phase, its benefits - including fast
time
14 VANILLAPLUS AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2011
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With virtually everything going on in oraround
the internet, fraudsters andtheir peers also act
within, andmanipulate for their criminal intent,
thesurrounding social networks.
to market and low affordable monthly pricing
-are just too compelling to ignore. This is why
lastyear we launched cVidyaCloud, our umbrella
ofon demand revenue intelligence applications,
forservice providers of all sizes. It is
available overthe web on a monthly subscription
fee withoutthe need to install hardware or
software.
that the client expects. Lastly, we ensure that
theclient knows that were here to stay.
Although aproject might come to an end, the
relationshipdoesnt. We enter into a long-term
partnership sothat the customer will know that
we will be thereto help their business grow and
provide
consultation and advice at each new stage
alongthe way. We work closely and continuously
withthe customer to brainstorm and provide our
VP How does cVidya work with itscustomers to
deploy solutions that
expertise from other customers to
alldeployments.
generate rapid ROI and have an impact ontheir
profits?
VP What do you think makes a playerstand out in
the Revenue Intelligencedomain?
AA cVidya provides a complete solution fromthe
operators perspective. We provide our
IRISoffering together with consulting services
whichenables us to define the priorities with
the
AA One key ingredient, and something thatcVidya
is known for, is innovation. We were firstin the
market with revenue assurance and fraudsolutions
for 3G, data and IP services, rating andbilling
verification. We are currently developingand
deploying, in partnership with our customers,a
solution for the mobile money space thatenables
operators to tailor their revenueassurance
solutions to fit the new value chain ofmobile
money. We are also penetrating othervertical
markets such as utilities, M2M and tele-voting
in which knowledge we have gained fromthe
telecom, entertainment and media areas willbe
used to tailor solutions to these markets.
operators and guarantee ROI for the
differentproduct deployments. The fact that we
provide
consulting together with supportive products
andtools allows us to adjust the products to the
needs of the operators more effectively in
orderto prevent leakage and identify revenue
losses.We also ensure that our products are
synced witheach other. We enable complete
knowledge
sharing between the IRIS portfolio
applicationsbe they fraud, dealer management,
margin
analysis or revenue assurance. Customers
aresometimes tempted to take cheap or
low-costsolutions but then they often find
themselvesstuck with poor performance products,
lackingthe flexibility to address new
challenges, and
In addition, a player stands out when they have
areputation for delivery excellence and a
without the innovative features that they need
orexpect. We make sure that our products
addressall those needs whilst taking into
account the ROI
commitment to the successful ending of
everyproject they engage in.
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