Connexn puts an enterprise-wide seal on service provider leakage

Along with new capabilities for its cost and revenues assurance solution, Connexn Technologies announced this week eight new North American and European service provider customers, half of which are using its new rating and usage applications.

Since the first of the year, Westminster, Col.-based Connexn has more than doubled its work force and grown its global customer list from 14 to 70. Four-year-old Connexn thinks it has found a sweet spot in the back office by solving service providers revenue leakage problems.

Its Cost and Revenue Assurance (CRA) product, which began by identifying discrepancies between network configuration and services and what was actually in the billing system, has expanded to provisioning, activation, service consumption and with this new release to usage and rating. Central to the Connexn solution is a three-pronged approach to ensuring data integrity, which includes telecom domain expertise, related methodologies and the Connexn Solutions Framework.

“The technology piece is a must,” said Charles Crenshaw, president and CEO of Connexn. “This is an industry that is made up of tons and tons of transactions. In order to accurately get an enterprise-wide of where revenue leakage is you have to have technology that can sift through all [that data.]”

That is what separates a solution such as Connexn’s from more process-oriented solutions such as those offered by system integrators and database providers who have tweaked their solutions in order to jump on the revenue assurance bandwagon, said Sanjay Mewada, director of telecom software strategies at Yankee Group.

“That doesn’t cut it,” he said. “You can’t do this on an ad hoc basis. You have to do it across the enterprise and the only way you can succeed is if you can productize your solution.”

With the addition of usage and rating applications, Connexn now has a product that can identify revenue leakage through network element event records, mediation, rating, billing and invoicing systems to help validate data for rate plans, tariff structures and pricing models as well as traditional billing.

Connexn’s sweet spot has become more that detecting, correcting and ensuring data integrity to stop revenue leakage. It also is in identifying and recovering operational costs associated with that leakage.

“The reason we put the ‘cost’ in Cost and Revenue Assurance is because statistically we see that for every dollar of revenue that leaks, there is 40-cents of cost associated with it you can drive out,” Crenshaw said.”

Those cost come in the form of false dispatches or truck rolls, duplicate assignments, bad customer records and other operational issues.

“A lot of people think about plugging leaks, but once you have done that and you look at the benefits that have accrued, there is a cost element that gets captured,” Mewada said.

Based on the new customers being counted by Connexn, which include Tier 1 wireless providers in the U.S. and Europe, as well as Tier 1 European wireline providers, service providers agree that with service revenue flat, CRA is a way to increase it.