Category: General

In almost every major sports analogy where a ball is used, the coach is always telling players to “keep their eye on the ball.” In baseball this is obviously critical. Certainly the same holds true in cricket. Other sports rely on this fundamental as well; the ball is the player’s universe. Without keeping your eye on that ball scoring doesn’t happen, and victories escape our favorite teams.
In the world of Revenue Management the same analogy has been applied to those charged with protecting revenues. “Keep your eye on the money.” We’ve all received our marching orders to monitor and protect the revenue process, from where value is generated, billed, and ultimately collected.
What has inevitably happened, however, is an ever-growing expansion of what was originally a relatively simple carrier business model. Consider this maturing timeline for most operators over the years:

• Risk Management (“ERM”) became an embedded factor in enterprises as they grew larger
• Revenue Management soon grew on its own within Risk Management, eventually dominating the ERM program with both Fraud and Revenue teams operating (mostly) autonomously
• Operator business models have since evolved well beyond the classic voice services that ERM was chartered to monitor, further stressing an already crowded ERM oversight domain

Suddenly (actually, over the last 20 years), Risk Management programs are finding that there is no longer a single ball to keep their eye on; in fact, there are many. Revenue is now generated from many streams (e.g., product lines), all using different business models. But what makes this even more difficult is the relationships and interdependencies these product lines have with each other – these also need to be monitored for risks and failures. Now ERM can’t simply deploy independent, autonomous teams to track individual streams – the collaboration and sharing of consistent data and resources is now a critical requirement.
Putting this into context, let’s talk about fictitious Carrier “A” … we’ll call them Rio Hondo Telecom:
Rio Hondo offers 3G and 4G mobile services. They also operate as an ILEC (Independent Local Exchange Carrier), so they have invested in a great deal in underground plant, in the form of both copper and cable, to serve the majority of their 1 million customers. Through that plant they offer fixed line telephony, broadband, and video broadcast services to consumers, and high-speed business service packages to enterprises. Unfortunately, they have no last mile access to 15% of their enterprise customers, and 10% of their standard consumer customer base is too far away to receive broadband and broadcast services. Therefore, Rio Hondo has formed several partnerships with other operators to round out their service offering to those outlying customers. They started carrying services 65 years ago…and their ERM teams formed in the early 1980’s. They have limited Fraud and Revenue controls in place, yet their business models have grown well beyond what they can easily monitor for risks. Where should their ERM teams be focusing their resources? Candidates must include both revenue generation and revenue support functions, among others.

1. Revenue generations functions:
   a. Event creation, mediation, and billing
   b. Recurring charge integrity
   c. Retail sales of equipment and services
2. Revenue support functions:
   a. Retail and call center provisioning operations, and change requests
   b. Order integrity and fall-out management – critical for bundled service delivery
   c. Capturing of traded/returned equipment, including tracking to warehouse receipt
   d. Chargeback management, merchant charging integrity
3. Cost and other support functions:
   a. Service call management and charging
   b. CPE and inventory assurance
   c. Commissioning integrity
   d. Partner services delivered as ordered, billed appropriately

This operator example is not uncommon, and certainly something that we have successfully worked with operators to manage for much of the last 16 years. What has been learned over this time that ERM can’t just keep their eyes on the “business model complexity” ball; now ERM must also keep their eyes on every ball that deals with product, service, and support inter-dependencies that now dominate the carrier business landscape.
This is the foundation that drove the birth of the ROC from Subex. First envisioned over a decade ago, the latest generation of ROC3 products fully support the monitoring and instrumentation of every facet of Revenue, Cost, Fraud, and Network Asset protection within the operator’s business…all from a single, integrated architecture. With ROC3, operators can not only keep their eyes on as many balls as their business can throw at them, they can easily manage which ones to catch, and which ones to hit “out of the park!”

The Internet of Things. While the discussions around IoT are interesting, in reality what are these “things”? More importantly, why should operators care? On the surface the answer is simple: The IoT world is all about Monitoring, and Machine to Machine explosive use of networks. It’s all about how to plan for the capacity – where to invest, when, and how much is needed to meet the IoT demand? This is the realm where Subex Asset Assurance and Network Analytics platforms help operators plan, procure, and place assets to quickly and effectively meet that challenge.

The Internet of Things, however, goes much deeper than a network optimization discussion. The IoT is ultimately about data. Data about our lives, our spending, our health, the “things” that support us (power, roads, air quality, resource availability, etc.). The value in the IoT is in the collecting and monetizing of that data.

Imagine the scope of that data, by walking through a day in a life where IoT is engaged. Waking up is now more about an alarm clock. It’s now about a smart home knowing what day of the week it is, and therefore what time you’ll be wanting to wake. It’s about the home knowing what temperature the water heater needs to maintain to support the amount of water you typically need to shower; it’s about knowing which rooms in your home you’ll be using today, and controlling the environment in those rooms at the right time. It’s about anticipating your food consumption…and warning you when those supplies are low. An even smarter home will seek marketing promotions from local grocers, to give you best options for pricing to replace those depleting supplies.

In this whitepaper we’ll explore the value of IoT data in more depth, as we continue through a day in an IoT engaged life. This data has the ability to steer spend habits, and thus help retailers secure share of wallet. Analytics and Data Sciences are a crucial component in the successful harvesting of IoT data, and any latency in understanding the data will absolutely make the difference in determining who wins the wallet-share competition.

I’m delighted to be speaking at Subex’s User Conference in Prague in October.

For the last 10 years I’ve been researching and promoting new business models for the telecoms industry. This type of innovation is now more important than ever, as pressures on the existing business model get stronger and stronger.

Trying to grow when markets are saturated, when there is greater competition from new players and regulators are less benign is very difficult using traditional approaches.

All my clients are struggling with this growth challenge and, more broadly, how they stay relevant in the fast evolving ‘digital economy’.

The answer is to start by more fully understanding how the digital economy is playing out and what approaches and business/operating models work best when there is abundant connectivity and powerful new technologies available at low cost.

In my talk, I’ll be covering the topics below with the aim of stimulating a vibrant discussion on the practicalities of creating a new growth story for telcos:

• Macro context for digital transformation: The ‘Industrial Internet of Things’ – far bigger impact on society than the consumer internet. How do telcos need to prepare to enable this?
• Business model innovation in the digital economy – lessons from digital native organisations like Apple, Alibaba, Amazon, Salesforce, Xiaomi and others.
• New role for telcos to enable local digital economies – creating the next wave of growth, beyond connectivity
• Telco transformation – learning from the worst and the best practices of Western telcos.
• Key Challenges and how to overcome them: technology, culture, organization, metrics.
• Roadmap to creating a ‘Digital DNA’: quick wins and strategic investments

As a pre-read, you may be interested in an article I wrote recently for research firm, Analysys Mason, which describes the business model evolution that’s needed for telcos:

https://www.analysysmason.com/About-Us/News/Newsletter/telcos-platforms-Jun2015/

I look forward to meeting participants at Subex’s event in October. In the meantime, if you have any questions or ideas, do get in touch: simontorrance1940@gmail.com

Last year the 100th anniversary of a profound scientific achievement which shaped the modern world went by completely unnoticed by the general public. It was 100 years ago that the physicists William and Lawrence Bragg shot x-rays through various crystallized substances and were able to decipher the resulting diffraction patterns to reveal their hidden atomic structure. For that discovery they won the Nobel Prize and the science of X-Ray crystallography was born, a technique which now underpins almost all modern science, from medicine through to astronomy. Crystallography has been used to reveal the chemical composition of penicillin, insulin, Vitamin B12 and, more recently, the Mars rover Curiosity is utilizing the CheMin instrument for detecting the chemical composition of the Martian soil. Perhaps one of crystallography’s greatest triumphs started with Photo 51, the nickname given to the image Rosalind Franklin took of the DNA molecule back in 1952, and which was subsequently used by Watson and Crick to unravel the double helix structure of DNA. DNA is often described as the blueprint of life, since it contains all the instructions by which living creatures are built.

The discoveries of pioneers like Bragg, Franklin, Watson and Crick are inspiration for those who are fascinated by finding the data patterns that reveal what’s hidden beneath. Like the X-rays of crystallography the Subex ROC RA product can see through the B/OSS by automatically analysing inputs and outputs to reveal, report and even auto-correct the hidden misalignments and other issues within. Issues which can lose a company millions overnight.

Now ROC RA has also taken Revenue Assurance a quantum leap forward by introducing DNA. DNA provides the building blocks to automatically audit data streams from throughout an organisation and reduces the configuration effort drastically. The predefined blocks of DNA code can be used to rapidly build up the system topology and reconcile the data and interfaces thorough simple point and click selection of modules. Any adjustments or enhancements to the audit processes can be quickly made through a highly intuitive graphical interface. DNA templates cover Prepaid, Post Paid, Interconnect, Roaming, Content and many others traffic types from almost 100% of known switches, mediation and billing systems.

Coupled with DNA are powerful new visualization and analytics capabilities that let you forecast how KPI will change over time, correlate KPI, apply what if modelling and alert you long before issues get critical. ROC RA lets you incorporate those KPI and alerts into a built-in model of your business so that the right information is channeled to the right person at the right time. You decide what level of detail you want and how and where you want to see it, be it by email, mobile dashboard, SMS or desktop dashboard.

DNA now makes ROC RA even easier to use than ever and will make the picture of what’s really happening in your business crystal clear.

The industry buzzwords and focus around Big Data Management are starting to wane in the media, but should it?

Consider this: In 2015, the internet is expected to carry over a Zettabyte of data for the first time ever. Even more interesting…and alarming…is that by 2020, forecasts are calling for upwards of 35 Zettabytes, per year (!), to be carried. If Big Data were a round of golf, and we as an industry thought we were somewhere around the 2nd or 3rd hole, in reality, we haven’t even purchased our clubs yet.

For those of you not familiar with a Zettabyte, here is the breakdown:
1000 Terabytes = Petabyte
1000 Petabytes = Exabyte
1000 Exabytes = Zettabyte

Mobile video data alone has increased over 3500% since 2010; statistics abound for data growth – and they all point to explosive growth continuing. With the advent of 4G, raising data speeds and volumes by an order of magnitude, we now see 5G appearing by 2017 in some markets – again raising the volumes and speeds by yet another order of magnitude. Everything in our lives is being connected. Cars, appliances, our bodies (and embedded equipment to run them, e.g., pacemakers), every shop and street corner (video), and even the air, the water currents, and the space surrounding our immediate planet, are all feeding data in increasing volumes and depths into our collective networks. What does this mean?

It means, quite simply, that we haven’t even begun to understand what Big Data is and how it will impact us. It also means that the communications industry, and the backbone it supports, has a long way to go (as the default host for much of this data) to be prepared.