cVidya-ECtel to Generate $40m in Annual Revenue?

Following their merger with fellow Israeli RA vendor ECtel, cVidya announced they would be

the leading global vendor in the Revenue Intelligence category, in terms of market share, revenues, installed base and product portfolio.

I blogged straight away about the difficulty of verifying cVidya’s claim, highlighting in particular that rivals WeDo and Subex might claim to be the top revenue earners in the sector. cVidya’s figures are not publicly reported, so that is where I thought the story would end. However, Israeli business news outfit Globes has once again let slip some useful information about Israel’s revenue assurance companies. In the Globes story about cVidya’s purchase of ECtel, they reported

ECtel had revenue of $13.2 million in the first three quarters of 2009, and was expected to finish the year with nearly $20 million revenue, a figure similar to that of cVidya [my emphasis].

In other words, Globes hints that the revenues of the combined cVidya-ECtel business will be around USD40m a year. How does this compare to the revenues of competitors?

Sonaecom, parent company of WeDo said in their first-half report for 2009 that WeDo generates 68% of service revenues in their SSI division. In short, this means WeDo had revenues of 21.3m Euros for the half year. If they keep up that performance, WeDo’s annual revenues will be roughly USD 60m. As far as I know, all of WeDo’s service revenue comes from providing RA and Fraud-related products and services. Turning to Subex, their business has had its ups and downs in recent years, but previous results show they can be relied upon to have total annual revenues somewhere in the band of USD 100m to USD 120m. Working out how much of that relates to RA and Fraud Management requires some extrapolation, because they do not make it clear. Subex puts their offerings into two broad categories: revenue management (which we are interested in here) and fulfillment (which is not relevant to a like-for-like comparison with cVidya). Subex’s revenue management orders have always tended to outstrip their fulfillment orders, so it follows they make more from revenue management than fulfillment. Using the ratio of orders presented in their Q2 FY10 shareholder presentation would mean two thirds of Subex’s revenues are generated from RA and Fraud systems. In other words, that means Subex generates revenues of USD 66m from RA and Fraud, even in a bad year.

There is a lot of extrapolation and interpretation in the numbers, but my conclusion is that even including ECtel’s sales, cVidya is not the biggest business in ‘Revenue Intelligence’ as measured by revenues. There may be some revenues that should be stripped from WeDo’s and Subex’s figures to give a reliable like-for-like comparison with cVidya, but my rough figures suggest both of them earn USD 60m or more from RA and similar offerings, in comparison to cVidya’s USD 40m. Now that cVidya has doubled in size, there is no argument that it is a leading vendor in this global market. But cVidya has a way to go before it can boast of being the leading vendor.

Eric Priezkalns
Eric Priezkalnshttp://revenueprotect.com

Eric is the Editor of Commsrisk. Look here for more about the history of Commsrisk and the role played by Eric.

Eric is also the Chief Executive of the Risk & Assurance Group (RAG), an association of professionals working in risk management and business assurance for communications providers. RAG was founded in 2003 and Eric was appointed CEO in 2016.

Previously Eric was Director of Risk Management for Qatar Telecom and he has worked with Cable & Wireless, T‑Mobile, Sky, Worldcom and other telcos. He was lead author of Revenue Assurance: Expert Opinions for Communications Providers, published by CRC Press.

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