Subex ROCcloud launch offers revenue management to small telcos

Like their larger peers, Tier 2 and Tier 3 telcos are exposed to fraud and revenue-leakage problems but too often lack the resources to appropriately counter them.

To serve those customers, vendor Subex today launched ROCcloud.com — an on-demand revenue operations center (ROC) offering focused on fraud management for smaller service providers. “For what are generally believed to be ‘non-core functions,’ we felt it was time to address a largely ignored segment of the market: smaller telcos that need a scaled-down version of standard products,” said Vinod Kumar, group president of Subex.

Too often "big-system" business/operations support system products are developed to address the needs of large telcos, priced beyond the needs of smaller players. Subex’s cloud-based version of its core ROC platform addresses those concerns by helping carriers fix license and implementation fees as well as minimize the requirements for dedicated infrastructure and domain expertise, Kumar said.

Subex is banking on the idea that smaller companies will be willing to forego some of the bells and whistles of regular fraud offerings in exchange for a product that provides good basic functionality such as detection of known fraud types and patterns of unusual behavior, investigation of unusual patterns for potential fraud, and creation of knowledge from patterns intended to upgrade and protect the business against future intrusions.

The product is designed to shield smaller players against a generation of smarter, shrewder fraudsters through a three-step philosophy of detect-investigate-protect. Both rules-based alarms and comprehensive case data are accessible through a single window in a Web-based GUI. Unlike most other managed services/SaaS services, ROCcloud boasts a zero-implementation service scenario, in which a standard product portfolio is available with minimal on-boarding and setup.

To access the service, users go to roccloud.com and navigate a simple workflow mechanism that provides full application access rights and logins once a secure connection is established and customers map their data feeds into the tool (i.e., a usage feed of CDRs and subscriber data). They then have full application access over that Web GUI. After a service fee is paid, customers leverage a shared license and product access through Subex, which possesses the “deep domain” experience and the infrastructure.

By taking in detailed subscriber and usage information, the solution detects fraud in a variety of telecom environments (e.g., wireline, wireless, services, postpaid, prepaid, VAS, MMS and m-commerce).

“The key is that the solution is easy to engage and disengage,” Kumar said, highlighting that ROCcloud’s shared infrastructure is spread across various global locations. “Through built-in video tutorials and configuration wizards coupled with Subex support, we ensure telcos do not need significant in-house domain expertise to operate the service.”

Subex feels this segment of small- to medium-sized telcos has been in large part ignored by the industry, Kumar said. The scaled-down ROC will help Subex expand into this segment by allowing them to address business needs while completely avoiding infrastructure and implementation costs, or those around people, services and maintenance, he added.