Revenue assurance is an important and growing aspect of financial wellness in telecom. It also presents a healthy opportunity for purveyors of revenue assurance solutions. Most research shows the market growing steadily over the next three to four years. We reported in our last issue on the consolidation and maneuvering of software vendors in this space as they jockey for a bigger share of what will be a $1.5 billion market by 2013.
However, the revenue assurance space is complex and evolving, and all analysts seem to view the market a little differently. Technology Research Institute, for instance, issued its fourth report on this market segment since it began covering it in 2000 and puts the market at $2.23 billion by 2013. While Dan Baker, research director at TRI, expects this market to continue growing at a compound annual growth rate of 4 percent, the biggest difference between his projections and others that put the market at $1.5 billion is his inclusion of mediation and analytics software.
Through his analysis, Baker sees some of the more traditional aspects of revenue assurance shrinking or growing at slower rates than analytics and the newest category of revenue assurance: least-cost routing, or as Baker describes it: traffic routing management. He expects the market share for analytics software to grow from 30 percent to 39 percent and traffic routing management’s market share to grow from 1percent to 3 percent. Traditional revenue assurance and cost management will both pick up another percentage point while mediation drops by 10 percent and fraud management by 2 percent.
“People have sucked as much value as they can out of traditional cost management,” Baker said. “Much of that has been driven by the contention between ILECs and IXCs, but that world has changed. So the trend is away from the reconciliation of invoices to do more usage analytics.”
