Good PR for Subex

The top team of Indian revenue assurance vendor Subex has been doing the public relations rounds recently. CEO Subash Menon gave an upbeat, but not very informative, interview to Indian newspaper The Hindu. What Menon says is less interesting than what he does not say. For example, he emphasizes strong revenue growth. However, after last year’s poor financial results, the priority for the company was identified to be a significant improvement in profitability, with only a modest revenue target. Indicating that the company will be ‘back in the black’ is a long way short of promising that original profit forecasts will be realized. There has to be a suspicion that Subex’s strong revenue growth is being bought at the expense of thin margins. You can read the interview here.

Meanwhile Subex CTO Mark Nicholson and Subex’s customer Verizon are all over this article about revenue assurance. There is nothing particularly new in the article, but once again we hear about Subex’s branding concept of the Revenue Operations Centre (ROC) as if it were the be-all and end-all of revenue assurance. A deeper insight would have highlighted the conflicts between the different visions for revenue assurance that are suggested elsewhere in the article. For example, the ROC is essentially the idea of revenue-assurance-as-monitoring, with people employed to sit at desks each day and respond to alarms when things go wrong. This does not fit particularly well with ideas that revenue assurance should be branching out into the analysis of product profitability. Assumptions and decisions about pricing points and margins may need to get reviewed from time to time, but not on a day-to-day basis, and not by the kinds of people who would work in a ROC. Even if such reviews do highlight problems, you would not respond to them in the same routine way that you might respond to an error in transaction data. Might the ROC, with its emphasis on routine data crunching, end up becoming a straitjacket that prevents Subex diversifying into more intelligent areas of business performance enhancement?

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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1 COMMENT

  1. Talking about PRs, there are public news and other not so public. The fact is that RA vendors are facing a very difficult time, not only business has been tough in the RA arena for the last years, the recent global economic slow down is hitting even harder these fragile companies.
    The Israeli startup, cVidya Networks, has fired 10% of its manpower in the Israeli offices and a similar number of workers abroad.
    This is the beggining of more news to come in the next weeks.
    Happy new year!!

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