Business Assurance: Where Upside Meets Downside

Let’s be clear about two things from the jump.

First, business assurance is much more complex today than it has ever been. Second, the dollars involved are substantial, to put it mildly. What does “substantial" mean?

There are several good answers, depending on how the sector is defined.

Using a more expansive definition (one that melds revenue assurance, analytics and mediation), Technology Research Institute estimates that the sector will account for $2.2 billion in 2013. Using a less expansive definition (which it calls “business optimization"), Analysys Mason estimates the sector was worth $760 million in 2010. Using an even less expansive definition, Stratecast estimates the sector will be worth $413 million this year.

Depending on how the definition is structured, business assurance is worth many hundreds of millions of dollars per year, minimum, or several billion dollars per year, maximum. Substantial, no matter how the definition is constructed.

As the several possible definitions suggest, business assurance is a complex subject. Its complexity mirrors the increasing sophistication and variety of contemporary communications services. Those services – and the demands they put on service providers, particularly their BSS/OSS professionals – are going to become ever more sophisticated and diversified in the future. Mobility, video, high bandwidth services – the modern technology world is pushing forward relentlessly.

Matters were not always so complex. Not too long ago, business assurance was about revenue assurance, or put most simply, about verification verification. Was the user being billed properly for the (relatively) small service sets being used?

Now, business assurance is about much more, knitting revenue assurance to content and applications in a much more robust, dynamic and rapidly changing services environment.

Let’s melt a complex subject down to its most basic element for a second.

The most important touch point between a service provider and a customer remains the bill. If the bill is wrong, not much can be right. If the service provider is underbilling, woe betide the bottom line. If the service provider is overcharging, the customer will not be forgiving. In either worst case, the BSS/OSS professionals responsible for business assurance are in dire straits.

And as content and apps are layered into the equation, the business-assurance challenge becomes immensely more difficult, requiring up to date information about industry standards, best practices and trending.

But new times require new thinking, and new thinking is reshaping business assurance.

B/OSS has published a new Report, entitled “Business Assurance: The Final Evolution in Revenue Management." Written by B/OSS Editor-in-Chief Tim McElligott, the Report reviews business assurance, and discusses how it points to a more coherent and promising future.

Written for a service provider audience, the Report is available free right here.

Comments? Questions? E-mail me at llannon@vpico.com or click on the comment button below.

Larry Lannon is group publisher of VIRGO ’s Communications Network, which includes Billing & OSS World , Channel Partners and V2M .