A press release from Rocco Research hails their first ever report on the quality of vendor solutions designed to prevent international revenue share fraud (IRSF). Of the 12 vendors reviewed, Rocco named Mobileum, Syniverse and Tomia as belonging to ‘tier one’ for IRSF protection.
The report was produced by asking the opinions of 71 mobile operators. I am unclear how this leads to reliable rankings; presumably none of the operators used all 12 vendors, making it difficult to assess if a 5-star rating of one vendor by one telco really is better than a 4-star rating of another vendor by a different telco. Rocco’s own description of their research was inconsistent; in one place they refer to assessing vendors using “over 30+ Key Performance Indicators” although they talk about “35+ performance and leadership KPIs” somewhere else, before offering a graphic that promises they used “over 40 KPIs of leadership and performance”.
The top tier firms are quite different in nature. Mobileum mostly supplies data analytics and network intelligence systems. Syniverse offers a variety of networking, messaging and clearing services. Tomia is the product of the merger between Starhome Mach and Telarix, making them experts in roaming and interconnect.
If you want to find out more you could purchase Rocco’s report, which retails for GBP2,100 (USD2,700) plus sales tax. But I have a different suggestion: telcos should tell vendors to stop gassing about how serious IRSF fraud is, and to start providing succinct and straightforward explanations of what they can do to prevent it. The marketing obfuscation that surrounds this topic is needlessly dense, and this report is a byproduct of that problem.
