With a 15 percent growth in revenue in its latest quarter, Subex has begun to see its own little recovery from fiscal 2008.
In its quarter ending March 31, Subex reported net consolidated revenue of $25.78 million, bringing the company to $120.8 million for the fiscal year. That compares to $23.40 million and $104.5 million, respectively.
Product revenue also increased in the quarter from $16.9 million in the fourth fiscal quarter last year to $19.91 million. Year over year, it was up from $77.87 million in fiscal 2008 to $94.36 in fiscal 2009.
Overall, the company saw 15 percent growth for the year, with products alone growing by 21.18 percent.
Subash Menon, founder, chairman, managing director and CEO of Subex, said the company’s efforts to turn around the business have been successful. “We are now on a growth track with all hurdles behind us, and we will continue our efforts in building a world-class company.”
Driving much of the turnaround is a renewed interest in revenue management solutions due to the effects of the economic downturn. “Revenue assurance groups started by picking pennies from broken [call detail records] but now they have become very important groups as companies watch every one of those pennies,” said Mark Nicholson, chief technology officer at Subex, at the recent Management World event.
Another driver is the success of its Rocware product. Subex’s recently released Rocware 2.0 uses the concepts and methods of business intelligence and applies them to operational assurance, which in turn assures revenue. It is a component of Subex’s Revenue Operations Center, now known as the ROC. Subex has been promoting the network operations center model for revenue assurance for over a year and it is beginning to pay off, thanks in part to support from companies such as Verizon and other Tier 1 providers.
Menon said the company also has been able to scale the ROC concept to make it available to Tier 2 and Tier 3 providers. He also said the economy has made service providers more amenable to the idea of managed services and to doing business with partners that have a large bouquet of solutions, which is something a ROC requires.
Subex’s Rocware 2.0 is designed to help service providers focus on the customer experience, operational efficiency and net margins.
Nicholson said business intelligence solutions currently focus on strategic versus operational issues and lack operational assurance functions to check the integrity and accuracy of the data. The ROC, he said, empowers communication service providers to monitor and assure systems and functions that impact profit margins.
