March 2005
Hello again everyone. You may have noticed that the ATS Network & Billing Update has not been sent out recently. Since our last newsletter, a lot has been going on with us. In fact, 2005 marks our 10 year anniversary, and we have been working hard on new products and with new customers to make sure it is a big year for us. Keep an eye on our website (www.atso.com) for some new product information coming soon. Hope you enjoy this issue!
The ATS Network & Billing Update is published by Advanced Technologies & Services, Inc. (www.atso.com), a revenue and service assurance solutions provider. This free newsletter is a guide to telecommunications OSS, billing, and revenue assurance news and other telecom industry analysis. To unsubscribe, contribute an article, or for offbeat news, please scroll to the end. Feel free to forward this newsletter!
In this issue:
ATS celebrates 10 year anniversary!
By:
Randall B. Guthrie,
President, Advanced Technologies & Services
In 2005
ATS celebrates our tenth anniversary. As we reflect back on 10 years
of business, we at ATS can’t help but reflect on how much – and how
little – our industry has changed. The good news is that “Revenue
Assurance” doesn’t have any of the bad connotations it once did.
Just about everybody sees this as a worthwhile endeavor and
something quite apart from an audit, which remains as welcome as
dental work. The bad news is that there are so many vendors out
there, who’ve all latched on to the same airy promise (3-4% of
revenues) that – were they all to deliver on their promised goods –
a company could “save” more than 100% of their current revenue! The
selection of a revenue assurance provider has become a dizzying
experience for Telco managers.
We at ATS are proud of our accomplishments over the past ten years.
ATS was one of the first companies to enter the revenue assurance
business back in 1995. Our entree into RA was in the form of SimCall,
which was originally designed to be a network optimization tool. ATS
marketing managers quickly realized that the revenue associated with
translations errors was so significant that we began to market
SimCall as a revenue assurance tool. To date we have saved over 200
Million dollars for over 30 clients worldwide. SimCall today is
still the only tool in existence that can quickly check a network
for translations errors and is generally considered the most widely
deployed RA tool in facilities-based networks.
Back in 1997, we foresaw problems in intercarrier billing and we
developed AMADEUS to help us to take the complexity out of the
intercarrier billing arrangements. AMADEUS has evolved to be a
powerful revenue assurance tool that has served numerous clients in
our industry. In 1998, when the industry first started to contract,
we realized that traditional licensing and pricing models were going
to become unattractive to telecom clients and we were the first
company to introduce revenue assurance services in a service
bureau/ASP environment. We continued to innovate in 1999 by
introducing a contingency model that has become a standard in
revenue assurance.
With a decade of innovation and experience behind us, we look
forward to continuing to work with you as business process experts
and partners. Our tradition of innovation will continue during our
second ten years as we help you to find, quantify, and fix problems
that cost you money.
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Watching Competition Made Really Simple
A recent study of telecom executives showed that around two-thirds them are not instituting formal practices to track their competition. This is obviously a startling statistic, considering that the telecom industry is so heavily influenced by competitive trends and government regulations. The study also showed that most companies are ignoring competition in developing markets like China and India.
With many new developments in telecom, such as VoIP, digital media, 3G, broadband to the home and Wi-Fi/WiMAX, it is essential to monitor new technologies and new competition. In the past keeping up with telecom news meant trying to keep track of many sources including newspapers, industry magazines, and competitor press. However, recent developments in internet technology have made gathering and tracking news much easier. A new web publishing standard called RSS (which stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary), allows you to retrieve multiple up-to-date news sources from one source, or news aggregator. You can even use this technology to have regular updates sent to you by e-mail. One draw back is that it may take some time to get used to the jargon wrapped up in RSS (I'm sure you've heard the buzz word of the moment: blog), but don't get discouraged. The potential benefit of this technology to keep you on top of the telecom industry is well worth it.
Here are some links to get you started:
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OK. By now, we all recognize
the tremendous marketing clout of Apple. Through the IPOD, they've
turned a small hard disk into the Sony-Walkman reincarnate of this
century. But now, we also see that they're going after the PC space
as well. Steve Jobs recently joked that he wished he'd had a nickel
every time someone asked him why he didn't pursue a 'down-market,
outsourcing' strategy similar to Mr. Gates' "let everyone use DOS,
then Windows" strategy. Well, he says, now he does. Enjoy the Mac
Mini.
But, those of us in the telecom space need to take note of what's
really going on here. What he's distributing is actually a mini-Unix
server (take note Software Providers touting state-of-the-art ASPs:
How does this revelation change things? Well, it could mean that
distributed computing will get in vogue real fast; faster than you
can say "My customers want my app more than they want to shuttle
date to and from me." More on that in another post.)
It also means that Apple's little-talked about communication device and software, ICHAT is going to start taking aim at Cisco's expensive VOIP phones and, maybe, even a slice of ol' Ma Bell. With the FCC set to rule on VOIP's implication rulings (likely to remain unregulated, except for when it terminates on the POTS network), there's going to be increasing reasons for VOIP players to find a way to avoid the POTS network. Getting business consumers hooked on ICHAT & MAC makes Apple a telecom player, not just a computer manufacturer. Watch out, Ma Bell ... Ma Steve has plans.
Blast from the past: best of our newsletter
As part of celebrating our 10 year anniversary, we thought it would be good to look back and see what we have done over the years. These are a couple of our favorite articles since we started this newsletter three years ago:
-
February 2002: Reciprocal Compensation Issue Just Keeps Going and Going…
OffBeat
News:
Sexy Road Reports
TERRACE, B.C. (CP) - Northwest B.C. residents who dial a toll-free government number in the Terrace-area phone book to check on road conditions will get an explicit description. Just not about roads. The sexy female voice at the other end of the line may be a pleasent suprise to a few, but a bit startling to the rest of us. The 1-800 number for Ministry of Transport road report appears in the B.C. government blue pages of the northwest region directory. But the number in the new edition of the phone book hooks callers up to a phone-sex line. The last digit is two numbers off. A spokesperson for the ministry says the U.S. directory company that publishes the phone book never verified the information with them and it was a simple mistake. The Utah-based company says it's a simple typo and it's considering withholding distribution of the rest of the books.
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