Intel Capital Leads Funding for Tribold

Rainger said the pressure is intensifying on service providers to improve time-to-market and keep costs down. Stratecast analyst Nancee Ruzicka agrees. In her report last August called “Recreating the Catalog: Global CSP Strategies for Product and Service Management,” she listed reduced time-to-market and cost reduction as two of the top six business requirements for dynamic product management and fulfillment. “[Communications service providers] can no longer tolerate a 12-18-month product creation cycle. Thousands of products are, or will be, offered to each line of business and CSPs must be able to define, launch, deliver and retire those products in minutes, days or weeks rather than months,” she said.

The company’s main product, Tribold 3.0, is a single, integrated suite of EPM applications that empowers CSPs to be product-focused. It includes a Centralized Product Catalog (CPC) and a Design Time Catalog (DTC) and enables the functionality of product data management and integrations as well as product lifecycle management and business intelligence.

“Customers feel they are very short in these aspects,” Rainger said.

Tribold helped Telekom Austria streamline its product catalog and product management problems that arose through its acquisition and expansion outside of Austria. According to Ruzicka, the service provider had multiple, incompatible product catalogs, multiple instances of the same product, inconsistent processes and was unable to track performance of individual products. Tribold worked with Telekom Austria to implement the business modeling, process modeling and solution architecture necessary for a streamlined product management solution.

Most important, she said, was rationalizing existing product catalogs into a unified catalog using a common data model and then configuring the service and feature components for reuse. Telekom Austria is in the process of deploying Tribold's product catalog and a Cramer service catalog from Amdocs. Based on the business case for the deployment, Ruzicka said Telekom Austria expects to achieve more than $11 million in annual savings as a result of faster competitive response and reduced churn. An additional savings of more than $300,000 is expected due to reduced billing errors. Beyond savings, Telekom Austria also hopes to generate additional revenue as a result of deploying a consistent product management solution.

“The ability to develop more products and pricing plans as well as more sophisticated products is expected to generate upwards of $13 million in additional revenue annually,” Ruzicka said in her report.