Broadcasting

August 25, 2006
cVidya ensures revenue assurance for IPTV

NEW DELHI -- The business of IPTV has lately become one area where revenue assurance is especially critical. As service providers focus their efforts on IPTV deployment to gain market share, the support systems' infrastructure receives lower attention, and they find themselves increasingly exposed to financial risks resulting from data and process integrity issues. Furthermore, information and revenue flows must be managed between a growing number of content providers and other partners, in addition to the network and consumers. The complex relationship between various content and service providers on one hand, and the increasing demand for rapid provisioning and high quality delivery of new services on the other, have emphasised the need for a holistic approach to revenue assurance. Drawing on its market insight and experience in revenue assurance methodology, cVidya has created a solution based on MoneyMap/Suite, employing the full scale of revenue assurance techniques to address the revenue assurance and data integrity challenges associated with IPTV.

cVidya Network, a leading provider of telecom data integrity and revenue assurance solutions, has recently launched MoneyMap revenue assurance solution that enables operators to correlate and consolidate information from all network, operations and business systems. Through an ongoing process, it automatically detects problem areas in which profit margins are decreasing as a result of revenue leakage, data inconsistencies or resources are not being used efficiently, leading to substantial revenue loss. Once MoneyMap identifies the areas of revenue leakage and resource inefficiency, operators can promptly correct and manage the problems to achieve profit maximisation.

Alon Aginsky, president, CEO and co-founder, of cVidya Networks, shares with Convergence Plus his insights on issues that need to be addressed on the revenue assurance front. Excerpts from the interview.

Convergence Plus: What do you mean by revenue assurance in IPTV?

Alon Aginsky: IPTV introduces both business and technology challenges to the operators. Past experience, and in particular services such as xDSL-based Internet access, mobile data services and VoIP, shows that the ‘rush-in’ and ‘gaining market share’ strategies by themselves, caused a lot of revenue leakages to the operators in the long run. The aftermath shows that revenue leakage can be avoided if adequate steps are taken early enough in the technology and service deployment stages. IPTV these days is exactly at the right point in time and in the right stage of the technology life cycle where the use of revenue assurance practices can bring the most benefits for the long run.

CP: What are the different types of revenue assurance issues that need to be addressed?

AA: The deployment and operation of IPTV implies on the network, the support systems and the partner/customer relationships. The internal business processes are not likely to go under a critical change. Hence, most of the revenue assurance issues that IPTV brings onto the table refer to inter-systems data alignment, which might result with incorrect charging of customers, or not charging them at all, for the services they consume; miscalculations as for the profit margins associated with content and applications provided by a third parties and re-packaged together as offers for the customers, difficulties to handle the complexities of rating plans that consists of more parameters than ever before and addressing QoS and QoE (Quality of Experience) to be able to refrain from excessive rebates due to false complaints made by customers.

CP: How do you tackle revenue leakage resulting from prepaid fraud and international roaming fraud?

AA: I would say that the way we tackle these issues is by collecting information from the relevant network and BSS devices (e.g. prepaid server, billing system, AAA system, Partner Relationship Management system), conduct a series of correlation tests and determine the ‘suspect’ records, and then studying the usage of the customers behind the suspect records in an attempt to find convicting patterns defined by fraud management best practices.

CP: What are the challenges in designing a revenue assurance system?

AA: When designing revenue assurance system, one has to take into account the variety of challenges that the system is supposed to address (which technologies, which specific issues), the required deliverables (online operation, reports), the complexity of the business processes and data structures, the volume of the information flowing into the system and the storage requirements, the inbound and outbound interfaces that the system has to support and the pace of the change in each of the above mentioned challenges.

CP: What are the potential gains for revenue assurance through cVidya's solutions?

AA: MoneyMap/Suite, cVidya’s product-based revenue assurance solution, provides the ability for a fast recap of revenue losses and excessive investments, with low TCO, thanks to its easy and rapid deployment, agility, analytical capabilities and resolution process support. In terms of revenue reclamation, the amount may vary from one operator to another and from one business line to another, but it mostly between two percent of the total revenue and 15 percent. Beyond the opportunity to recover the revenues, cVidya’s MoneyMap/Suite-based solutions support current and future revenue assurance needs and provide visibility over the whole carrier’s revenue chain.

CP: What are the revenue assurance challenges for IPTV operators?

AA: The revenue assurance challenges for IPTV operators are directly derived from the business challenges these operators have to face. The fierce competition imposed by the cable MSOs (Multi Service Operators) creates a pressure on the IPTV operators to launch services as quickly as possible, which in many cases means that the process definitions and the integration between the systems are left with loose ends, especially in the areas that are not considered as critical for the immediate service delivery. This creates situations, in which the representation of the customer data, the service definitions or the contract information is different in different systems. The huge effort to enhance the network in a very short time makes it vulnerable to human errors, which, if not directly affecting the service, are either unnoticed or remain unhandled due to priorities.

Providing and monitoring quality of service and quality of experience is also an issue as it is a basis for customer disputes, subject to automatic or semi-automatic rebates in cases of SLA breach and subject to human considerations, and hence an exposure to fraud, abuse and human errors. Another business challenge that derives a revenue assurance challenge is the growing complexity of the value chain, which forces the IPTV operator to deal with content and applications coming from multiple providers, and then offered in a bundled manner to the end customers. This mix and match makes it difficult to map and track the actual revenue stream between the customers, the operator and the content & application providers.

CP: What are the revenue leakage risk areas in IPTV operations?

AA: We have identified that the most relevant risks associated with IPTV, as a technology and as well as a service platform, are the ones associated with data integrity – due to the network’s enhanced complexity and the demand for online real-time self provisioning, and those associated with the partner/customer management, due to the new value chains that are formed in order to provide the content and application richness that IPTV is supposed to offer to the customer.

CP: What proactive steps are being taken to address IPTV revenue leakage?

AA: An IPTV operator can take proactive steps as early as the planning stage of the IPTV rollout. It is important to maintain alignment and integrity when creating the business processes associated with the new service, when dealing with the bundling and pricing plans, while deploying network equipment and when engaging in contracts with application and content providers.

The next step of the IPTV service life cycle where proactive revenue assurance can provide great benefits is at the stage of the subscription of customers to services. At this stage, the customer profile and the contract between the IPTV and the customer undergo a lot of changes in a short time, and these changes are supposed to be reflected in disparate operational and business support systems. The data at this stage is vulnerable and inconsistency of the data at this stage would most probably become revenue leakage as soon as the customer begins to actually use the service and to be billed for it. cVidya has identified these needs and its MoneyMap/Suite offers the required means for highly automated and flexible data integrity, process aware revenue assurance and rating and billing verification capabilities, both active and proactive.

(Alon Aginsky, President, CEO & Co-founder, cVidya Networks)