Q1 2010
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 to your friends and co-workers!
In this issue:
ATS Celebrates 15 Years in
Telecom Revenue Assurance
By: Randall
Guthrie,
President, ATS
On May 19, 2010, Advanced Technologies and Services, Inc. will celebrate its fifteen year anniversary. In early 1995, ATS was part of a software company called Beechwood Data Systems located in Clark, NJ. ATS was spun off from Beechwood in order to allow Beechwood to focus their efforts on providing custom software solutions to the industry, and to allow ATS to pursue its desire to provide network and billing assurance services to a then rapidly changing telecom industry.
During our first 15 years, I have witnessed many changes that I must admit I never anticipated. Those of you who were around in 1995 remember that email was just beginning to become the communication vehicle of choice. The internet gave us new ways to disseminate information, giving birth to blogs, industry forums, and real time investment advice and on and on. The internet basically gave us so much access to knowledge that we had no excuse to not know what was going on in every facet of our industry.
Skype, Google, Amazon, eBay, Craigslist and all of your favorite browser bookmarks and websites either didn't exist or were only shells of what they are today. Telecom was still dominated by the Baby Bells and we saw the emergence of a new class of carriers known as CLEC’s (many of which are now gone), which were going to revolutionize the industry. We saw the birth of VoIP services, enhanced mobile services, the explosion of text messages, as well as the move from measured to flat bundled services. We witnessed stock market euphoria as fortunes were made and lost during the tech bubble. We have seen companies like Apple turn the music industry on its head with iTunes, and we watched that same company define what a smart phone really is.
It's been a great run and all of us at ATS are proud of our contributions to the industry but as the saying goes, there is more to be done. We are in a new era in business assurance and this point was driven home to me at the Telestrategies Revenue Assurance 2010 forum in Phoenix in March. I attended this conference two years ago and the theme then was finding process errors and fixing them. Most of the panel discussions this year however, drove home the point that the new goal is not to find errors, but rather to fix them before the customer experiences any kind of disruption. I attended panel discussions moderated by carriers such as Bell Canada, TW Telecom, Verizon and they unanimously agreed that revenue and business assurance tools and processes have matured.
As ATS celebrates 15 years in Telecom business assurance, you can look forward to us contributing to the evolution of revenue and business process assurance with some exciting new product and service offerings.
Products and Services
Testing services. ATS has been known for 15 years for its work in intercarrier billing assurance and network assurance. Our SimCall tool is still the industry standard for testing network switches and we will continue to serve that niche. ATS proudly serves all the major carriers in North America with our reach in this business extending to all of the US, Canada and the Caribbean. Last year we extended SimCall's capabilities by securing a customer who uses SimCall to test their VoIP switches. 2010 will be the year that we introduce SimCall for tandem switches and wireless switches. Our early prototypes have demonstrated that SimCall's technology is such that it can accurately and completely test these network elements.
Provisioning tools. ATS' automation tools (MTP) combined with SimCall's powerful rules engine are being combined to provision new code openings in a major US carrier. The first provisioning application will take advantage of information that SimCall houses to determine which switches are affected in new code openings. The next phase of this project will identify new codes that will be opening, identify when the code is to be opened, and then automate the provisioning process by opening the code in the switch network. We will keep you posted on these new SimCall modules.
Data analytics. Two years ago I spoke at a Billing OS forum in Chicago and talked about the inevitable merging of revenue assurance and CRM. At the time, we referred to this as revenue and business assurance 2.0 and based on what I heard last month at the Telestrategies conference the industry agrees we are now there. Due to the business processes that are typically analyzed by RA groups, RA managers have, what is referred to as the golden repository of knowledge and data that spans entire organizations. ATS has developed tools that effectively look at this golden repository of data to help identify trends that could affect churn and customer satisfaction. We are working on tools that not only predict churn but that predict customer satisfaction. Our Key Metric Analytic tools are built around the need for clients to better manage areas of the business that affect Key Performance Indicators (KPI's). ATS' first deployment identifies situations where usage for a given market is below predefined thresholds. Our clients receive timely reports and alarms of service affecting situations and our tools provide the drill down capability that get to the root cause so that problems can be permanently eliminated. ATS is currently developing applications for different functional/operational units including call centers. Our call center tool helps call center managers forecast incoming calls, customer hold times, call durations and many other factors that optimize the use of resources.
ATS Footprint
Since our founding in 1995, ATS has focused on the US telecom market. Telecom is where our expertise lies and so we will remain dedicated to this industry. However, ATS has developed tools that are needed in international markets. We are in the final stages of a SimCall trial in Germany and through our business partners have several opportunities in other international markets. Like all ATS expansion plans we will undertake this step cautiously and without impacting our core business in the US, Canada, and the Caribbean. We will keep you posted on our successes.
So it has been an interesting 15 years and all of us at ATS are grateful to our dedicated clients, many of whom have been with us for our entire 15 year history. We will continue to think out of the box and strive to be perceived as partners to your businesses rather than just vendors.
Randall B. Guthrie
President
Advanced Technologies and Services, Inc.
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ATS Continues to Impress Clients
Each year ATS conducts an anonymous survey of all our customers to gauge our performance and get ideas for things to continue doing or improve upon. Those surveyed submit their responses online and completely anonymously to ensure we get the most honest responses. The survey addresses customer perception regarding ATS accessibility, subject matter knowledge, and responsiveness.
Once again, our clients gave us high marks. Some survey highlights were:
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100% of those surveyed are confident that ATS support personnel will respond to needs in a timely manner.
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88% of those surveyed feel ATS support personnel is very accessible.
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80% of those surveyed rate ATS’ responsiveness to customer’s needs as very responsive and 100% rate it as either responsive/very responsive.
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92% of those surveyed perceive ATS as a partner rather than a vendor.
We'd like to thank everyone who participated in the survey and we will strive to continue to exceed your expectations in the years to come.
Ryan Guthrie
Director of Network Integrity
Advanced Technologies and Services, Inc.
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Telecom Industry Ripe for Consolidation
Courtesy of NY Times
Naguib Sawiris, the chief executive of Orascom, the Egyptian group that runs wireless phone networks around the world, believes the global industry of mobile operators is about to enter a turbulent period of Darwinian struggle.
"The next few years will witness major consolidation," Mr. Sawiris said last month at an industry convention. "All small and medium-sized operators are looking for appropriate M.&A. deals to be able to secure themselves a place on the new world map."
With global markets on the upswing and governments around the world looking to blanket populations with mobile broadband service, experts say the wireless industry is poised for a wave of mergers and deals that could reshape the industry.
While the growth in demand for mobile data helped operators weather the economic downturn, the global financial crisis slowed the pace of M.&A.'s, or mergers and acquisitions.
Click Here for the full story.
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Offbeat News:
Internet 'in running' for Nobel Peace Prize
Courtesy of BBC
The internet is among a record 237 individuals and organizations nominated for this year's Nobel Peace Prize.
The number of nominations surpasses last year's record of 205 nominations.
The internet's nomination has been championed by the Italian version of Wired magazine for helping advance "dialogue, debate and consensus".
The director of the Nobel Institute, Geir Lundestad, told BBC News that the organization had received "thousands of nominations" for the coveted prize.
"Some were nominated by one person, others by 10, others by 100," he said.
The secretive organization does not release the list of nominees, but nominators sometimes announce their choices.
The nomination for the internet is supported by 2003 Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi and the founder of the $100 laptop project Nicholas Negroponte.
Click Here for the full story.
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