Revenue assurance vendor cVidya has announced they have completed the purchase of fellow Israeli business ECtel. You can read the announcement here. The merged business will operate under the name of cVidya. One sign that the old ECtel brand will be rapidly killed off is that the old ECtel website has already been taken down.
In an interesting spin on the story, the announcement emailed to customers said that:
The acquisition of ECtel positions cVidya as the leading global vendor in the Revenue Intelligence category, in terms of market share, revenues, installed base and product portfolio.
That is a pretty mighty claim. How do they know? Comparing product portfolios is pretty subjective, especially when you are talking about an arbitrary ‘category’ of products like Revenue Intelligence – a phrase I have not seen used before. Comparing market share and revenues can be objective, but you need data to do the comparison. An RA firm should understand that more than most. One of the problems with comparing RA vendors is that about half of them are privately owned, meaning they make no public announcements about revenues. cVidya fits into that category, and the delisting and acquisition of ECtel means ECtel’s numbers will no longer be public either. The public has never seen reports of cVidya’s annual sales or earnings so we cannot verify their claim. Then again, cVidya has not seen the comparative numbers for other privately-owned vendors, making me wonder how they decided they are the biggest. Even sifting through the figures that are reportedly publicly is difficult. The information reported may be abbreviated because the business is part of a group, or the vendor may have other revenue streams that complicate a like-for-like comparison.
This is not the first time the RA industry has seen contentious assertions about who is biggest. I have written before about how Subex and WeDo had competing claims to be the biggest revenue earners in RA. I concluded that post by saying Subex’s RA revenues were higher, if you counted fraud management as part of RA. Following that post, WeDo dropped me a line to say I should have excluded FMS from RA and then they would have come out on top. With cVidya now saying they are biggest, it will be interesting to see the response from the guys in Lisbon and Bangalore…
Not sure how a company with a name like “wedo” can set the rules saying that the metrics for nominating the largest RA vendor should be with or w/o FMS sale figures. Subash Menon made a calculated risk, increased Subex footprint and consequently its revenues. It worked well, and therefore IMHO he should not be “discounted” only because Wedo said so. Needless to say, had worked the other way around, no one would “increase” Subex revenues as a compensation.
This reasoning holds especially in the case of a company that supposed to stand to its name. “we do” or “we do not do”?
Hi Dear Mr Dead,
Hope you do not mind being treated on a first name basis.
We (at WeDo Technologies) do not mind being treated on a first name basis,
and rest “assured”: WeDo! :)
We are proud of being part of a competitive marketplace.
It is and will be the market to say who actually leads.
Additionally I fully agree with a recent post in this blog that mentioned that
all companies in the RA market space gained much from being
strong competitors. So… let’s competition continue!
I take this opportunity to wish all TalkRA readers and bloggers a fantastic year!
Best regards,
Sergio