REVENUE ASSURANCE

Charlie Thomas
CEO
Razorsight

Revenue assurance is a tough game with tough competition. The category has continued to expand over the last decade to include fraud, cost management, margin management, and intercarrier compensation. Vendors have both expanded with it and led the expansion through acquisitions and new product development.

The market itself — the financial assurance market — according to the latest numbers from Stratecast | Frost & Sullivan, will reach $470 million this year and expand at a 12.8 percent compound annual growth rate to $765 million by 2016. It happens to be the hardest category for vendors to get service-provider customers to vouch for them in terms of the benefits they provide, so it is sometimes necessary to look elsewhere for validation. In this case, Razorsight, a vendor out of Reston, Va., was named by Stratecast as the strongest financial assurance supplier in North America. Its report called Razorsight the global leader in cloud-based financial assurance and analytics solutions that empower mobile, cable and wireline CSPs, ranking it at the top in both revenue and number of customers served. Stratecast also cited the company’s expansion in the AsiaPac region and Latin America as a strategic move that will yield significant dividends.

Charlie Thomas believes he has a 10-year lead on his competition as a pioneer in cloud-based business intelligence and analytics. “The ability of our solutions to unlock the value of providers’ big data in near real time opens new windows of margin enhancement quickly and cost-effectively,” he said.

Stratecast reported that software-as-a-service (SaaS) captures 16 percent of the global financial assurance market and that Razorsight led global suppliers of SaaS or cloud solutions with 33 percent market share as of 2011. Razorsight’s financial assurance solutions are delivered only through a cloud-based SaaS model called Profit Enhancement Center, and Thomas has led the company to revenue growth every year since its founding in 2001.

PRODUCT INNOVATION

Catherine Michel
Co-founder and chief technical officer
Tribold Limited

For all the things Tribold Limited could be credited for as a successful company, one of its most unsung attributes may be its stick-to-it-iveness. It has kept a strong focus on the continued development of its Enterprise Product Management software solution, and while the product has always been successful, a new set of customers coming from the evolving market of applications and virtuality is beating a path to its door.

Catherine Michel is the CTO and cofounder of Tribold as well as the principal architect of the company’s product and solutions portfolio. As Tribold started off 2012 with the fifth release of its EPM, she said, “When leading industry analysts like IDC and Gartner take note, and as customers continue to buy from us, we know we are accomplishing what we set out to do.”

IDC said the company has a unique approach and a strong solution, “probably the best in the business.” Tribold claims its EPM solutions now support more than $80 billion worth of products and services. The fifth release supported something Tribold calls Product Data Publishing, which allows users to configure many target destinations to which data in the catalog can be published prior to launch. The objective is to test changes before they’re formally launched.

That became an important feature for the company as the pace of new product and service introductions skyrocketed. Michel said it was some of her company’s best work and that it addressed key pain points for customers. For that it received Pipeline’s 2012 Innovation Award.

This year Tribold certified its EPM with the TM Forum’s Frameworx standard and signed an OEM agreement with Alcatel-Lucent. This summer it also won a deal with Teracom and shortly thereafter integrated its solution with Pegasystems. Michel said the pre-integration between Tribold EPM and Pegasystems Order Management gives CSPs that critical link between their product catalog and the solutions that deliver the product to the customer.

In May Michel and her team launched Tribold CPQ, a configure-price-quote (CPQ) services engine that powers the front end of the CSP Quote and Order Capture process.