Surviving the Recession: Keeping the Dollars You've Already Earned

But these days, a whole new range of service, content and advertising partnerships have emerged that create altogether new challenges for service providers.

“Carriers are having issues operationalizing and managing partnerships,” said Al Brisard, vice president of marketing at Vertek, whose offerings demonstrate the trends in this area, spanning traditional revenue assurance, financial assurance and, most recently, a new partner assurance solution. Among the service provider users of Vertek’s partner solution is Qwest Communications, which uses it to evaluate how well its partnerships are doing from a profitability standpoint. “Partnership assurance is just starting to become more recognized,” Brisard said. “It does a lot of what revenue assurance does but adds a whole new layer in terms of tracking and measuring contract terms and ensuring a service provider doesn’t have exposure there.”

At Management World, carrier Swisscom demonstrated in the show’s Content Encounter area a so-called “content revenue management” solution that it built with vendor partners Convergys and cVidya. The idea was to build an open platform that third-party content providers could access to deliver content services to Swisscom customers while at the same time pre-verifying charging ranges and ensuring the carrier would accurately collect all settlements. An automated system detected any abnormalities or billing errors before they caused a problem, said Theodora Simeonidis-Orenstein, revenue assurance manager at Swisscom, who helped host the demo.

From a starting point of securing revenue and detecting fraud, revenue assurance has grown to encompass network and service assurance, third-party settlement issues and more – all the more crucial in a downturn when every penny counts, said Subex CTO Nicholson. The key is to treat these issues in a disciplined fashion.

“What is needed is true governance of these end-to-end processes that looks across all these processes from a revenue, cost and margin perspective,” Nicholson said. “The simple things – the 10% drops in headcount, getting out the slack in the system, the simpler system transformations – those have been done already. The stuff left for this downturn is the hard stuff.”