The analysts at Stratecast like to come up with some peculiar categories and initialisms, and that includes the market they describe as telco operations, orchestration, data analytics and monetization (ODAM). ‘Oh damn’ is not a good name for people trying to avoid slip-ups and wastage. Nevertheless, Stratecast’s 2018 report on the top 10 ODAM firms to watch includes several vendors familiar to Commsrisk readers because they provide RAFM solutions or services (or what Stratecast would call ‘financial assurance’). Those firms are:
- WeDo Technologies, Portuguese purveyors of software that locates leaks and frustrates fraudsters;
- Sandvine, the Canadian company that sticks its nose into networks and can tell which packets come from pirates; and
- Veriflow, American network auditors who find flaws and obviate outages.
Stratecast said that Veriflow’s technology…
…relies on the proven concept of formal verification, a methodology with principles that have been applied in other science and technology sectors such as space exploration, silicon design and aeronautics. Veriflow has brought the technology to networking and renamed it ‘continuous network verification.’
And this is what Stratecast said about WeDo:
Stratecast believes that as CSPs worldwide find their profit margins under assault, revenue assurance, fraud management and business assurance solutions like those offered by WeDo become more important.
That is not such a compliment, because it obviously applies to any business ‘like’ WeDo. Also, I must have been in a coma during the years when telcos were not complaining about profit margins being under assault. But Stratecast added:
In addition, by working on SaaS risk management innovations, capable of assuring the digital transformation journey for CSPs, at a lower cost, with no compromise to security, WeDo continues to demonstrate its understanding of emerging challenges and is developing the solutions to overcome them.
So Stratecast think software-as-a-service is important, and maybe they will be proven right, though the adoption of RAFM SaaS has been slow so far. Meanwhile, I am left wondering if their analysts are paid by the comma.
I would tell you more about Stratecast’s reasons for highlighting these firms, but that was all I learned for free. If you want more, the report will cost you USD6,000. Initialisms and commas do not come cheap…