The news from the Billing & OSS World Conference is that Telcordia were winners of the excellence award for Best Revenue Management Solution. Metratech were runners-up.
The awards are only open to those businesses attending the conference, so the real question is not who won, but why they won. The B/OSS news bulletins shed no light on the subject. Neither Telcordia nor Metratech promote themselves as businesses that particularly focus on revenue management. Did they win because they did something well, because they showed up, or because the ‘revenue management’ category is treated as a miscellaneous category for everything that does not fit anywhere else? For example, Metratech were runners-up for Metranet, which they describe as “a charging, billing, settlement, and customer care product”. Fine, but why was this product nominated under the revenue management category, and not the awards for billing nor customer care? The explanation for Telcordia’s award was opaque:
“The global market for traditional services and value-added services is becoming increasingly competitive. Real-time charging and policy enables competitive differentiation for CSPs to realize the market opportunity and revenue potential that exists in delivering interactive, personalized services,” said Michael Wojcik, president, Service Delivery Solutions, Telcordia. “By better understanding subscriber’s preferences and behaviors, CSPs can provide a personal, interactive customer experience that drives service adoption, increases ARPU and reduces churn.”
The Telcordia solution includes a flexible policy and charging rules function (PCRF) that meets the requirements for an IMS PCRF and Online Charging System (OCS) within the Policy and Charging Control (PCC). The solution is powered by the Telcordia Converged Application Server, which combines the strengths of advanced service creation and call or session control with real-time charging and policy running on a multiservice telecom application server.
If you can charge people in real-time across multiple services, you have greater flexibility in how you calculate charges and can more effectively prevent overuse. That sounds fine, but how much extra ARPU does this generate, how much is the reduction in churn, and what exactly is Telcordia doing better than competitors that claim to do the same thing? Anyone with a good answer will be nominated for the talkRA award for excellence in transparent revenue management awards ;)
