TEOCO markets its Revenue Management solutions to service providers with a specific focus on “an event level analysis of the Inter-carrier, Roaming, International, and 3rd Party costs and all revenue associated with communications services.” TEOCO’s tools have the level of visibility CSPs need today: legacy voice, VoIP, wireless, and IP. Beyond visibility, TEOCO’s solution includes detailed financial insight, and associates margins with RA activities.

Other major vendors who offer compelling portfolios of next-gen revenue assurance products include cVidya and HP. cVidya’s RA offering, MoneyMap, accommodates all of the new service environments, including LTE, mobile money, machine-to-machine (M2M), wholesale, cable, satellite, and multi-play. Rounding out the leaderboard is HP, which has offered revenue assurance solutions to CSPs for more than 15 years. Its latest toolset, Revenue Intelligence, features HP CentralView, a solution that has real-time monitoring and analysis capabilities.

Recovering leakage

Once visibility is in place and leakage is being reliably identified, recovery efforts must be initiated. This is not always an easy task, especially given the complexity of today’s service sales, delivery, and support environments. In all regions of the world, a large gap remains between identified revenue leakage and recovered revenue leakage, as illustrated in figure 2 below.

Figure 2: Estimated Leakage Recovery, Ernst and Young, 2013

Next-gen RA solutions must also enhance recovery actions. In other words, they must seamlessly integrate with recovery tools, or offer recovery tools of their own, helping RA teams to close the loop.

Stopping the leaks

Competitive pressure and stagnant revenue growth have driven a greater focus on revenue assurance. It’s no wonder the market for solutions is growing. TechNavio research predicts an annual growth rate of more than 12 percent over the next three years.

The move to data as the primary revenue engine, the arrival of next-generation of services, the complex back-office reality, and the increasing competitive climate demand that service providers leverage next-gen revenue assurance solutions.

The winning solution has deep visibility, which requires evolved tools that can peer into packet traffic, and manage complex billing and partner relationships. It can correlate leakage with margins, and provide business intelligence into the effectiveness of RA activities. It can accommodate all of the new use cases that excite service providers and dominate talk during trade shows. And closing the loop, it can ultimately assist recovery in a seamless fashion.  

In today’s telecommunications business, it’s not enough for service providers to just create new revenue streams—they must also cover their assets in the best way possible. The solutions on the marketplace will enable CSPs to remain competitive, even against this challenging backdrop.