March 2012

Synthesizing the Telecom Business Assurance Practice With the Analytics World

by Dan Baker

“Science is analytical description; philosophy is synthetic interpretation. Science wishes to resolve the whole into parts, the organism into organs, the obscure into the known. It does not inquire into the values and ideal possibilities of things or into their total and final significance.“

—Will Durant, The Pleasures of Philosophy

I never quite understood why people who study technology markets are called “analysts.“ First of all, I don’t like Freud’s suggestion that detail-oriented people are babies stuck in the anal-retentive stage, though I’ll admit that analysts do get cranky when they’re starved of data. :-)

Here’s my other complaint. The word “analysis“ comes from the Greek word meaning “to break up.” But in telecom markets, we don’t need to break up things any further. In fact, there are already too many product categories, carrier practices, industry standards and solution vendors to sort out. The most valuable thing is not analysis but “synthesis“ — turning all the piece parts into a whole and trying to explain what it all means.

Having just completed a 635-page research report on the subject of telecom business assurance, I know what a job it is to be a synthesizer of information. There were about 70-odd people I interviewed for this report and each of them was a busy person whose schedule had to be interrupted for my study to get finished. In the end, I thank them all for letting me “borrow“ their insights so I could stamp the TRI logo on the report cover.

How Do You Define Business Assurance?

So what is Telecom Business Assurance? Well, it’s a wrapper term (similar to B/OSS) that allows you to draw a circle around the highly diverse and dynamic practice of employing business controls, workflows and data marts to check for retail or enterprise billing/ordering errors, fraud issues, wholesale or partner billing problems, and a host of other operational concerns. It’s Big Process and Big People, increasingly enabled by Big Data.

Some of the solution vendors like the “business assurance“ term; others do not. TMNG and WeDo have latched onto “business assurance” and use it in their marketing. Subex favors the Revenue Operations Center and more recently the “enterprise assurance“ theme. cVidya likes the term ”Revenue Intelligence.“ Then there’s MDS Lavastorm Analytics who used “business assurance” in the past, but now likes “analytics.“ Of course, all of these vendors have a big stake in addressing both revenue assurance and fraud management issues.

Meanwhile, the vendors who grew up in the cost assurance market, such as TEOCO, Razorsight and Connectiv Solutions, look at business assurance from a different angle. They don’t generally get involved in the business process issues that the RA players worry about. They are more concerned with inter-carrier and inter-partner costs. When they say revenue assurance, it usually means the revenues that are owed by a partner, such as in Carrier Access Billing in the U.S.

Though their choice of marketing words vary, all RA, fraud, cost, and margin-assurance vendors generally pursue the same broader solution set.

Where Does Analytics Fit In?

I agree with those who say “Analytics“ is the over-arching technology class: Business assurance is clearly a subset of telecom analytics. My trouble with the “A” word, however, is that it’s a Scarlet Letter that covers way too much technology witchcraft.

IBM, God bless its Big Blue soul, has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on its “Smart Planet“ analytics campaign. Now while we thank IBM for the publicity, the brand of analytics that telecoms need is more of the “Small Village” variety — the kind that business assurance vendors are delivering — a more fine-grained, more real-time, and more telecom-specific view of usage patterns, operational metrics, traffic stats and much more.

To help sort things out, we created the “Telecom Analytics World“ chart below:

Think of the analytics world as divided into two hemispheres. On the left side are “marketing analytics“ functions like customer retention and customer-experience analytics which primarily look at external, customer oriented forces on the business. The key question marketing analytics tries to answer is: “Given our current operational capabilities, what action can I take to capture the long term greatest value in revenue and/or profit from customers?”

In many ways, marketing analytics is the more traditional analytics use. It’s the market that companies like SAS Institute carved out and the function shares blood relations with marketing, customer care and CRM.

In the right hemisphere are the Business Assurance functions, which mostly focus on optimizing internal operations. And while “operating excellence“ is its mission, the outputs of business assurance can be of great value on the marketing side too.

The Role of Business Assurance

The primary question that business assurance asks is: “How can I protect and enable the business to grow by identifying errors in operations and minimizing partner and fraud-related costs?“

A great deal of “commerce“ (interaction) occurs in the Telecom Analytics World. There are no stone walls separating the Revenue Assurance Regency from the Fraud Management Fiefdom or the Cost Assurance Kingdom. Some functions spill over into others. Dealer management, for example, can be looked at from both a fraud and revenue optimization point of view.

Not to be forgotten of course are the “Ocean of B/OSS“ systems where analytics systems dive to extract their data treasure. And just as there are no firm boundary lines between analytics domains, the dividing line between sea and shore is also an illusion.

One business assurance that can’t be cleanly categorized is Optimal Routing, the descendant of manual Least Cost Routing. That function can be seen as both a network system as well as a cost assurance/analytics system, so in the diagram we had the words overlap the sea and land.

One last point: Mediation and Service Assurance serve a rather unique role. Most business assurance analytics today is driven by usage data collected through mediation systems. Yet as time moves forward and wireless service-quality measurement becomes more crucial, we think service-assurance data such as signaling and application performance data will rise in importance as a business assurance data source. We colored the words “Mediation“ and “Service Assurance” in bright green to indicate their special status as data collectors in the B/OSS Ocean.

So these are some of the ideas synthesized in our new business assurance study.

This article first appeared in Billing and OSS World.

Dan Baker

Dan Baker is research director of Technology Research Institute (TRI) and editor of the Black Swan Telecom Journal.

Technology Research Institute (TRI) has been writing analyst reports and researching telecom software and systems markets since 1994.

For the last several years, TRI has been following developments in telecom Fraud Management, Revenue Assurance and Analytics solutions.

Most recently, TRI is exploring telecom opportunities in IoT, connectivity, AI/ML and edge computing (4G and 5G) in the Asia Pacific market. Contact Dan via

Black Swan Solution Guides & Papers

Expanding the Scope of Revenue Assurance Beyond Switch-to-Bill’s Vision — Araxxe — How Araxxe’s end-to-end revenue assurance complements switch-to-bill RA through telescope RA (external and partner data) and microscope RA (high-definition analysis of complex services like bundling and digital services).
Lanck Telecom FMS: Voice Fraud Management as a Network Service on Demand — Lanck Telecom — A Guide to a new and unique on-demand network service enabling fraud-risky international voice traffic to be monitored (and either alerted or blocked) as that traffic is routed through a wholesaler on its way to its final destinations.
SHAKEN / STIR Calling Number Verification & Fraud Alerting — iconectiv — SHAKEN/STIR is the telecom industry’s first step toward reviving trust in business telephony — and has recently launched in the U.S. market. This Solution Guide features commentary from technology leaders at iconetiv, a firm heavily involved in the development of SHAKEN.
Getting Accurate, Up-to-the-Minute Phone Number Porting History & Carrier-of-Record Data to Verify Identity & Mitigate Account Takeovers — iconectiv — Learn about a recently approved risk intelligence service to receive authoritative and real-time notices of numbers being ported and changes to the carrier-of-record for specific telephone numbers.
The Value of an Authoritative Database of Global Telephone Numbers — iconectiv — Learn about an authoritative database of allocated numbers and special number ranges in every country of the world. The expert explains how this database adds value to any FMS or fraud analyst team.
The IPRN Database and its Use in IRSF & Wangiri Fraud Control — Yates Fraud Consulting — The IPRN Database is a powerful new tool for helping control IRSF and Wangiri frauds. The pioneer of the category explains the value and use of the IPRN Database in this 14-page Black Swan Solution Guide.
A Real-Time Cloud Service to Protect the Enterprise PBX from IRSF Fraud — Oculeus — Learn how a new cloud-based solution developed by Oculeus, any enterprise can protect its PBX from IRSF fraud for as little as $5 a month.
How Regulators can Lead the Fight Against International Bypass Fraud — LATRO Services — As a regulator in a country infected by SIM box fraud, what can you do to improve the situation? A white paper explains the steps you can and should you take — at the national government level — to better protect your country’s tax revenue, quality of communications, and national infrastructure.
Telecom Identity Fraud 2020: A 36-Expert Analysis Report from TRI — TRI — TRI releases a new research report on telecom identity fraud and security. Black Swan readers can download a free Executive Summary of the Report.
The 2021 State of Communications-Related Fraud, Identity Theft & Consumer Protection in the USA — iconectiv — This 49-page free Report on communications-related fraud analyzes the FTC’s annual Sentinel consumer fraud statistics and provides a sweeping view of trends and problem areas. It also gives a cross-industry view of the practices and systems that enable fraud control, identity verification, and security in our “zero trust” digital world.

cSwans of a Feather

Subex’s IDcentral Monetizes Telco & Enterprise Data to Deliver Digital ID & Risk Metric Services for Financing, KYC & More — interview with Shankar Roddam — A new digital intelligence service that monetizes the idle data of telecoms and enterprises while also earning a good return for the owner of the data.
New Report: Telecom Fraud & Business Assurance Solutions, Services & Strategies — by Dan Baker & Luke Taylor & Colin Yates — TRI publishes a new market research report, Telecom Fraud & Business Assurance Solutions, Services & Strategies. Free executive summary available.
Subex Juggles a Wide Variety of Business Assurance and Big Data Analytics Use Cases — interview with Rohit Maheshwari — A expert in business assurance solutions explains top use cases such as: IoT security, big data analytics/AI, network asset optimization, multi-player gaming assurance, onboarding mobile subs, and AI customer analytics.
Premiere Experts Set to Speak at Summer RAG Conference in London, July 7th and 8th — by Dan Baker — The Risk and Assurance Group (RAG) has announced that its 2016 summer conference will expand into a two-day event and feature many premiere experts.
RA Prevention: How to Manage Revenue Risks and Communicate RA’s Value to Senior Execs — by Shaul Moav — The era of revenue assurance prevention and risk assessment is here. Several of the mature operators of the world have developed their own methodologies and tools. Using firefighting and fire prevention as a metaphor, the article details a new commercial software approach explaining the goals, method of risk evaluation, and senior executive dashboards developed for the process.
From Risk to Robust: Turning the Big Picture Into a Real Agenda for Change in Telecoms — by Eric Priezkalns — Inspired by a Financial Times article written by Nassim Taleb, author of “The Black Swan”, here is an insightful and entertaining primer on telecom risk management. The article takes ten risk management lessons from Taleb and applies them specifically to the communications industry. You’ll learn about the value of small scale trials, organization accountability, cures for a blame culture, incentives that work, the power of simplicity, and more.
Synthesizing the Telecom Business Assurance Practice With the Analytics World — by Dan Baker — Business assurance is a wrapper term that allows you to draw a circle around various telecom assurance, control, and optimization activities. This article maps business assurance as a subset of telecom analytics, constrasting it with marketing analytics while a diagram shows where biz assurance fits in the larger B/OSS world.
Revenue Assurance vs. Business Assurance: Who’s the Rightful King of Controls Software? — interview with Sergio Silvestre — Business controls software, originally developed for RA, is finding application in other areas of the business such as internal audit, collections, security and risk management. This article argues that “business assurance” is the best term to describe this broader set of controls software that can find a home in numerous departments or functions of a CSP’s business.

Tokopedia, Indonesia’s E-Commerce King, Partners with 11 Million Merchants; Adopts Multi-Cloud to Drive Innovation — interview with Warren Aw & Ryan de Melo — Indonesia’s Tokopedia, founded in 2009, has grown to become one of world’s leading e-commerce players. Read about its success, technology direction, and multi-cloud connectivity adoption.
Bridge Alliance: Knocking Down Regional & Mobile Connectivity Barriers so Connected Car Markets Get Rolling in Asia — interview with Kwee Kchwee — The CEO of an Asian consortium of mobile operators explains how they help simplify and harmonize their members‘ operations in support of multi-national corporations. This integration is enabling two huge industries to come together in Asia: auto manufacturing and telco.
Epsilon’s Infiny NaaS Platform Brings Global Connection, Agility & Fast Provision for IoT, Clouds & Enterprises in Southeast Asia, China & Beyond — interview with Warren Aw — Network as a Service, powered by Software Defined Networks, are a faster, more agile, and more partner-friendly way of making data global connections. A leading NaaS provider explains the benefits for cloud apps, enterprise IT, and IoT.
PCCW Global: On Leveraging Global IoT Connectivity to Create Mission Critical Use Cases for Enterprises — interview with Craig Price — A leading wholesale executive explains the business challenges of the current global IoT scene as it spans many spheres: technical, political, marketing, and enterprise customer value creation.
Senet’s Cloud & Shared Gateways Drive LoRaWAN IoT Adoption for Enterprise Businesses, Smart Cities & Telecoms — interview with Bruce Chatterley — An IoT netowork pioneer explains how LoRaWAN tech fits in the larger IoT ecosystem. He gives use case examples, describes deployment restraints/costs, and shows how partnering, gateway sharing, and flexible deployment options are stimulating growth.
ARM Data Center Software’s Cloud-Based Network Inventory Links Network, Operations, Billing, Sales & CRM to One Database — interview with Joe McDermott & Frank McDermott — A firm offering a cloud-based network inventory system explains the virtues of: a single underlying database, flexible conversions, task-checking workflow, new software business models, views that identify stranded assets, and connecting to Microsoft’s cloud platform.
Pure Play NFV: Lessons Learned from Masergy’s Virtual Deployment for a Global Enterprise — interview with Prayson Pate — NFV is just getting off the ground, but one cloud provider to enterprises making a stir in virtual technology waters is Masergy. Here are lessons learned from Masergy’s recent global deployment using a NFV pure play software approach.
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Flexing the OSS & Network to Support the Digital Ecosystem — interview with Ken Dilbeck — The need for telecoms to support a broader digital ecosystem requires an enormous change to OSS infrastructures and the way networks are being managed. This interview sheds light on these challenges.
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