It may come as a surprise to some people working in revenue assurance, but their field of expertise is in decline. The telltale signs were evident for anyone willing to see them. The Wikipedia page on revenue assurance used to be aggressively spammed by vendors and charlatans, then it received no edits for many years, and in 2022 it was effectively deleted. Organizers of professional-grade conferences dropped revenue assurance from their annual programs well before the pandemic struck; now even the scummiest low-grade event companies are unable to lure anyone to RA events. But perhaps the best indicator comes in the form of web activity, as monitored by Google. This can be broken into three distinct eras based on the volume and quality of new web content which references the words ‘revenue assurance’:
- The golden era: there were a lot of crappy marketing reports which said spending on revenue assurance would grow rapidly; there were a lot of press releases from vendors of RA systems that highlighted new products and new deals; there were a few articles about why telcos should do revenue assurance.
- The silver era: there were a lot of crappy marketing reports which said spending on revenue assurance would grow rapidly; there were some press releases from vendors of RA systems that highlighted new products and occasional sales.
- The current era: there are still some crappy marketing reports which say spending on revenue assurance is predicted to grow rapidly.
There is nothing new about the phenomenon of lame ‘research’ being endlessly recycled on spammy websites with the intention to lure gullible fools into purchasing reports that cost thousands of dollars but which are worth nothing. Six years have passed since I last wrote about reports which were repeating the names of RA vendors that had disappeared many years earlier. What surprises me is that these same reports are still being advertised now. Has anybody bought one of these reports since the beginning of this decade? Or is the business model for shoddy marketing research so mechanical that it is more efficient to endlessly advertise thousands of worthless reports over and over and over because that is quicker and easier than weeding out the ones which nobody purchases any more?
In 2017 I observed that the copy-paste approach to ‘new’ reports had grown so tired that they no longer bothered to fill in the blanks. This is a verbatim copy of the sales pitch for one of those reports:
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.
Not much has changed, given the quality of a recent advert for a ‘new’ report.
According to the latest report, titled Telecom Billing and Revenue Industry Market Research Report 2023-2031 market: global industry trends, share, size, growth, opportunity and forecast 2022-2031, the global Telecom Billing and Revenue Industry Market Research Report 2023-2031 market is expected to exhibit a cagr of xx% during 2022-2031.
And they still continue to refer to businesses that stopped trading or changed their names years ago. Can you spot the defunct companies mentioned in this recent press release?
Key Players Driving the Market: Tata Consultancy Services Limited (India), Amdocs, Sandvine, Cartesian, Sigos, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP, Itron Inc, wedo technologies, araxxe, Subex Ltd.
The list of companies in this report, which supposedly forecasts the market from 2023 to 2030, is even more out of date.
The major players covered in the Revenue Assurance market report are: 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.
A short while ago another ‘new’ report, supposedly projecting sales from 2024 to 2030, announced it was finally time for the RA market to ‘expand overseas’. The expansion of revenue assurance ended long ago, because once sales have been made in Afghanistan, Mongolia and Suriname that are not going to be many more places left to visit. And where did the authors of this idiotic statement think was the location that revenue assurance was expanding from? But I am applying more thought to this drivel than the people who sell it; even their press release neglected to update the part where they say their sales research ended in 2020.
The supposed benefit of revenue assurance is that it prevents companies carelessly throwing money away. But the message was never understood by the people who buy these flimflam marketing research reports on revenue assurance.
Update 06:25 UTC, May 17, 2023: Several of the links to press releases are already dead despite being checked and live recently. It is likely that all the links in the article will die soon as the purpose of these websites is to generate a short-term flow of new traffic without preserving an archive that people can go back and check for misinformation when comparing ‘old’ version of the reports to any ‘new’ versions of the same reports.
