I do not know who buys market research from companies they have never heard of, but I guess somebody must. A string of press releases were recently circulated promoting a ‘new’ report on the revenue assurance market, supposedly forecasting the sales of RA software and services between 2017 and 2022. The same report is being sold via a lot of differently branded websites. The following links take you to three examples, where the wording is verbatim in each case: 1, 2, 3. The publishers think the work is worth paying USD3,000 or more. However, it does not take much research to find reasons to question the quality of that research. For example, who would promote a research report by making the following assertion?
The global Revenue Assurance Market in the Telecom Sector market is valued at XX million USD in 2016 and is expected to reach XX million USD by the end of 2022, growing at a CAGR of XX% between 2016 and 2022.
***Fascinating*** Who knew that a market worth XX could grow by XX% to reach XX?
Poker players have ‘tells’, facial expressions or gestures that reveal what is in their mind, allowing others to determine the quality of their hand. The simplest tell for a market research report is to look at the names of the businesses that were reviewed. If the list includes all the right businesses, then the researchers know what they are doing. If they exclude some important businesses, or include some irrelevant ones, then the researchers lacked the competence, or interest, to identify which businesses actually belong to that market. The list of RA suppliers mentioned by this report is a doozy…
The major players in global and United States Revenue Assurance Market in the Telecom Sector market, including CVidya Networks Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., Subex Ltd., WeDo Technologies B.V., Advanced Technologies & Services Inc., Capana Inc., Cartesian Ltd., Comware Inc., Connectiva Systems Inc., Equinox Information Systems Inc., Martin Dawes Analytics Inc., Neural Technologies Ltd., Teleonto Technology Pvt. Ltd., Teoco Corp., Xintec Inc.
Some of these are real and successful businesses. But it is easy to spot howling errors, or evidence that this is an old report being repackaged as a ‘new’ analysis of the market. Take the example of WeDo Technologies. They clearly exist. They are a Portuguese business. Which makes it odd that the report writers identify them as WeDo Technologies B.V. – the full name of a Dutch subsidiary company. Did they not even speak to the market leaders to find out where they are?
Then consider Cvidya, the first name in the list. Their brand disappeared in January 2016 when the company was bought by Amdocs and turned into the ‘Revenue Guard’ division of the big billing firm. So how old is this ‘new’ report?
If you think that was old news, then try to remember Connectiva Systems, another business in the list. Their management team tried to hide the fact that they went bust in the middle of 2012. Eventually some of the business was saved after they were acquired and partially rebranded. And then the resulting business was consumed completely by another acquisition.
Judging from Connectiva’s history, this ‘new’ market research RA report must have originally been written in 2012 or earlier. Though the authors have spammed the promotion of this report across the internet, they have not even done some simple googling to check what had changed since they wrote it. And obviously they do not read Commsrisk! Which really shows what fools they are…
