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Getting the most from your investment in business intelligence requires new tools and keeping up with new business models. Usage analytics, third-party providers and a transforming network are adding complexity to both the delivery of services and the management of the underlying costs of doing so. This e-book, sponsored by Razorsight and Billing & OSS World magazine, examines cost-management best practices that could help service providers maximize their revenue throughout.

Table of Contents

Achieving True Profitability Through Usage Analytics
In the drive to improve customer loyalty, carriers must consider how to optimize the use of their networks. It is imperative to understand what services are being used by whom, and to balance the costs and profitability of those services. That means grasping what suppliers are paid to terminate calls as well as to manage content and intellectual property. Communications services providers must weigh those expenditures against the revenue generated by a particular service.

The Complexities of Settling Third-Party Revenue
The players will be different in the next-generation network. So will the services, which will, at times, be more application- or transaction-oriented than service-oriented. But the problem of settlement does not go away. That song remains the same, and perhaps with a new digital remix, gets even more complex.

Identifying the Network Cost of Carrier Consolidation
Besides market share, much of the merger and acquisition activity in the telecom carrier space is driven by the lure of synergies — a fancy name for the oodles of cash locked up in redundant people, processes and applications. Some synergies are realized immediately through job cuts; others take time. The synergies to be found in the machinations of the billing process often come last, but not least.

How to Optimize Revenues and Margins in a World Characterized by Convergence and Next-Generation Networks
In a conversation with Billing & OSS World Editor in Chief Tim McElligott, Razorsight's CEO Charlie Thomas tells how service providers can improve margins while dealing with the challenges and opportunities of next-generation networks and convergence. According to Thomas, better cost management begins with an internal audit/analysis to determine their network-cost score and revenue-assurance score. These are ratios that Razorsight derived to determine the optimal blend of Cost/Investment versus Return/Savings from network-cost and revenue-assurance initiatives.