Convergence Plus spoke with Mr. Anandan Jayaraman (AJ), Chief Product and Marketing Officer, Connectiva Systems on the growth and achievements of Connectiva and the challenges faced by the company on the way.

CP: What are the main challenges you have faced in taking the company to a leading risk management solutions provider?

AJ: Connectiva started as an early stage product development company and has transformed itself into a leading supplier of revenue and risk management solutions. The road to success for entrepreneurial organizations is complex and fraught with uncertainties. There have been many challenges along the way – these include convincing early customers to take the leap of faith, being capital efficient without compromising on employee or customer satisfaction, knowing when to globally expand without over-reaching and expanding into new markets without losing focus on primary and core solutions. The key to our success has been the collective ability of the company to have the guts to pursue great ideas with passion, hard work and commitment and always finding a way to thrive and grow without getting overwhelmed by the magnitude of the challenge.

CP: Any landmark contracts coming from India after last year’s BSNL deal? What do you think are the prospects of future in India?

AJ: Connectiva's solutions have already been chosen by some of the biggest telecom operators in India and they span a wide spectrum ranging from large operators like Bharti, Idea Cellular to mid-sized and Greenfield operators. With new operators winning licenses, a surging subscriber base and ever-increasing challenges around risk, fraud and leakage, revenue management solutions have become a pre-requisite for success. We have won several new deals in India with Greenfield operators in the mobile telephony space and also in the DTH and cable industry. India has been one of our fastest growing markets for the last 2 years and we are very excited about the opportunity in India.

CP: How is the Indian market different from other established markets that you have worked with till now?

AJ: The Indian market has 3 major characteristics that uniquely differentiate the opportunity. These are related to:

a) Performance and scalability: Even mid-sized Indian operators have massive data volumes up to billions of event detail records per day. Any vendor who desires to succeed in India needs to effectively deal with this scale.

b) Pre-paid and real time focus: Unlike developed markets, India and several other emerging economies are dominated by prepaid usage. Revenue leakage, fraud and risk management take on different hues in the prepaid context.

c) Maturity of buyers: India has acquired significant telecom experience in the last decade and we deal with a very sophisticated set of buyers who exactly know what they want. CIOs, RA and Fraud managers in India are incredibly familiar with the intricacies of IT systems in the BSS / OSS landscape and the benefits / challenges of implementing revenue management systems.

CP: How much revenue leakage is caused by fraud in India? How does Connectiva SENTRY help? What is the USP of the solution?

AJ: Industry estimates show that telecom operators lose out over 7% to 15% of their revenues due to leakage, fraud and bad debt. In a research conducted by Connectiva in 2008, it was estimated that Indian telcos lose more than US$ 900 million every year – a significant chunk of this is driven by fraudulent activities on the network.

Connectiva SENTRY is the industry’s only next generation fraud management system that is built on an open standards based analytics framework. The solution minimizes an operator’s exposure and potential liabilities by continuously monitoring usage behavior throughout the customer lifecycle to identify fraudulent patterns. The solution’s proactive detection capabilities prevents losses across varied lines of businesses and products ensuring end to end coverage for all kinds of communications service providers. It also applies advanced statistical self-learning models and adaptive rule based approaches to ensure real time protection for a CSP’s revenue chain. The tool’s sophisticated learning process automatically eliminates false alarms, detects and traces fraud activities and is service and network agnostic.

CP: What drove Connectiva through during the slowdown? What are your biggest achievements during this period?

AJ: During the 2001 downturn as well as the recent crisis, Connectiva witnessed a reversal of trend – We continued to grow as operators accelerated deployments of revenue management solutions in a tough economic environment. We have helped customers recover hundreds of millions of dollars in recessionary periods when every dollar counts. In a counter-intuitive but yet logical trend, we believe that economic slow-downs make a stronger case for deployment of our solutions.

Over the last 18 months, Connectiva has broken into new markets, expanded footprint into more than 40 operators worldwide and launched new products and releases. We are growing at break-neck speed but growth comes with its own set of demands. We are laser focused on scaling effectively to meet the increased demand for our solutions in this marketplace.