Irish mediation vendor Openet has announced the deployment of its revenue assurance solution in Nextel Brazil. Read the press release here.
Openet’s revenue assurance application is built upon their own Fusionworks mediation software. This raises some interesting questions about the boundaries of what can be described as revenue assurance, and how to measure the value it adds. If Openet’s RA application is doing no more than assuring mediation, it begs a question of why this is not considered intrinsic to mediation, instead of being treated as an add-on to it. If it assures more than mediation, how much more, and where are the handovers to other assurance solutions?
its an old deal
2006-2007
why now?
A couple of very fair and interesting points are made here and they’re ones that we broadly agree with. The first is can a vendor who sells an application that sits in the call to bill path actually act as the auditor also, that is can you police the police, so to speak? In the Nextel instance, we are not actually the mediation provider; rather we’re the assurance provider. However, that would avoid the bigger point and would ignore the fact that in some cases we do in fact provide both services to some of our clients. By interfacing to any system that is needed, as well as correlating and counting events, we have become adept at two tasks that are vital in the Revenue Assurance teams arsenal when attacking leakage and this has brought about our involvement in the process.
The second question raised is that surely all application vendors and network equipment suppliers should be providing proof positive that their systems are doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing. The answer is of course yes. As a ‘mediation’ provider, even one already in the billing chain, one can deliver upon the Revenue Assurance team’s needs here by adding the step of comparing the number of signalling records for successful call set-up attempts and successful call completions against the number of CDRs delivered. In that way you can begin to ascertain if the switches are indeed recording all that they should. Similarly, by providing an additional simple interfaces to the billing repository, we can ‘count’ how many of the CDRs delivered out of Mediation actually ended up on the bills. Both approaches add a further layer of assurance to end to end flow in a relatively simple manner.
We as a vendor have a responsibility to not only do what we are contracted to do, but also to show that we have done it, and show that transparently. Our commitment to that transparency coupled with our provision of some of the stock in trade for the Revenue Assurance teams have led us to this place and the implementation of these solutions for our clients.