As the market moves to Mobile money, Machine 2 Machine (M2M), Cloud offerings, LTE, OTT and Social Network players, it brings huge opportunities. High-value/importance of transactions raise, the number of events and data volume explode, "All-IP" networks and communication streams appear, new network elements and systems play become involved, communication patterns diversify, and entities and identities number increase. The number of playing partners and value chain complexity increase, business models change, pricing schemes diversify and diverge, user equipment becomes even more powerful, and focus shifts from "bearer" to user equipment and to Credit and Payment management.
These changes also bring risks. It is critical that CSPs know how to mitigate these risks to guarantee their EBITDA margin.
Digital Services for mobile operators represent a large share of a CSP's revenue, and this share is rapidly growing. In response a CSP must have a Business Assurance process in place. CSPs must manage risks and business efficiency by processing complex events and applying data analytics techniques to extract value from the data, detect relevant behavior, and get to know their customer.
Bringing M2M as an example, the challenges of an M2M environment include the following:
- Low margins
- Increasing number of connected non-human automated devices
- Massive amount of automated transactions
- Wide coverage: Consumer Electronics; Utilities; Healthcare and Lifestyle; Building Automation; Fleet Management; Inventory Management; Entertainment; etc.
A Business Assurance process to mitigate these challenges must address the following:
- Provisioning Complexity: Entity Identity, Authentication and Authorization Issues; Interoperability and consistency between different platforms and networks.
- Reliability and QoS: Robustness to Intrusion; denial-of-service; unintended network congestion; malware; traceability; data privacy
- Business Model: Value chain monitoring; cost and margin assurance; partners and interconnect settlement with a whole range of different models, automated processes and effective revenue assurance controls to track the different cash flows, capable of supporting convergent settlement for multiple lines of business. It ensures that all billable activities are accurately captured, rated and billed.
In this scenario we can measure control points on the "order-to-cash" flow to identify problems during data processing and also to measure the revenue transferred to partner along with commissioning costs. We can then compare this to the total revenue collected by the telco operator as well as break down the information for products and bring strategic information on suggested areas of focus. Finally, we can follow up wisely on Integrator / Partner complaints. These steps can allow us to identify problems over network/charging/billing systems.
These critical elements in the Enterprise Business Assurance approach and an effective risk governance process all allow us to examine the big question: Can CSPs afford to lose money with digital services?