Consider a typical tax return. If you own a home and have a mortgage, you may be able to deduct interest payments -- at least in the U.S., (oh and by the way, this article is not meant to provide you with advice on doing your taxes. Please don't expect it to help you with the IRS at your next audit). If you made interest, you must pay tax on it and of course, on other income. The various income sources are added, tallied, put onto a form, or entered into software and voila, you have a tax return. Few people I know enjoy doing taxes. In fact doing taxes is probably the closest thing to a final exam many of us will have to deal with -- years after we leave school.
But what if there were real-time software that could monitor income coming in, investments, mortgages, etc. and would just do your taxes 24x7 for you throughout the year. It would be great. You would know where you stand at a moment's notice. No more scrambling to write checks for large sums at year's end because you were unprepared. We would place this solution in the category of personal financial management software.
With your permission, I would like to segue ungracefully into the service provider market.
Consider today's service provider dealing with customers in a more and more complicated world. For example, imagine a VoIP provider who must determine when a call was initiated, when it traversed through a session border controller and at what point it left the IP network and ended up in the hands of another service provider. This service provider has to figure out the duration of the call, where the call went and determine how much to charge the consumer and pay the other service provider(s).
Wouldn't it be great if there were software out there that could handle these IP transactions? Well, thankfully, there is and as you might expect, you can call this category of solutions, IP Transaction Management.
I caught up with
Primal Solutions recently and had a chance to speak with them about their IP Transaction Management Platform, IP Correlytics. One area of our conversation worth repeating is how communications transactions today involve more and more partners. Perhaps a single content provider or a group of content providers and distribution partners are involved in the more complicated transactions of the day. In fact, service providers have to grapple with an ever-increasing array of IP transaction management details and headaches.
Primal Solutions (
News -
Alert) feels they are in a great position to be a thought leader in this space as they handle one-third of VoIP transactions in the US at the moment. And it just so happens one of their customers is Time Warner Cable, so that pretty much sums up their market share claims.
The company also handles municipal WiFi (
News -
Alert)-- EarthLink is one of their customers in this space and they tell me they can handle any transaction and provide usage analysis. I spent a great deal of time talking with them about municipal (muni) WiFi and the company feels very strongly that it is crucial providers find a sustainable revenue model or networks will be built out with minimal capability.
One of the ways of generating revenue in this category is by offering tiered service. Another is to allow, and charge for, other broadband users on your network. So, as a muni WiFi provider, you may allow AOL customers on your network and charge AOL a roaming fee. AOL would in turn charge their customers for the ability to use this network when they roam into the area.
So getting back to the world of IP communications -- the company tracks anything that touches the CDR -- the SBC, SIP proxy, policy management, peering partners, EMI feeds from a Sprint (
News -
Alert), Level 3 etc. In addition, they track content partners, ring tones, and all transaction information. They stitch it all together and give a unified view of what happened to the phone call. They track it temporally -- you can see the switch touched the call at this point; the SIP proxy was touched at another point, etc. Using this information, you are able to see where there may be latency in the network, you can set up thresholds and averages, and if desired, you can be notified of problems.
One of the reasons this solution was developed is that service provider partners often would send bills 60 days after a transaction and the original provider would have to stitch back what happened to ensure they were charging the customer correctly. This is essential because rates for services are not in the VoIP provider's control and can change without much notice.
The company feels service providers need to grab every component and pull it into transaction archives while also guaranteeing that nothing is lost. Their tagline is "No IP Transaction Left behind," and they feel this is exactly what they do, as they ensure you don't lose anything.
For many service providers, humans do the reconciliation and because of this, it isn't easy to track whole transactions across partners. Many problems pop up when your systems aren't automated.
A boost to their business has been regulations like Sarbox and others that require insight into data and auditablity. In addition, there are legal and CALEA issues that are solved by having an effective record of all IP transactions.
Obviously, the archive of data we are talking about is huge and as such, the company provides web services allowing you easier access to the data. Many of today's billing systems are very complicated and they will interface with many of these current systems nicely.
If you are planning to sell to enterprise customers or currently do, the company's software can read input from a testing system such as one from Empirix (
News -
Alert) or Spirent and record it with the call data. This allows you to have recourse with another provider who isn't delivering the service levels they promised. It also allows you to give detailed quality data to customers as needed.
More and more companies are telling me that VoIP providers are losing tens, if not hundreds, of million dollars a year because of billing errors. Some estimates say the problem will balloon to a billion dollars by 2008 or 2009. I wouldn't be too surprised if this were the case. And my friends, between you and me, that number will buy a very nice number of
woohoo ads.
Another area the company helps with is mobile selectors, as the rates international operators charge for mobile calls varies frequently and if you aren't on top of this problem, you can find yourself in trouble very quickly. To clarify, some countries have mobile operators who change rates more frequently and erratically than you would think possible. Generally you learn about these changes much too late to recoup lost revenue, as your prices need to adjust accordingly.
Now for the sales pitch. If you aren't sold yet, the company could seal the deal for the following reason: Service providers really need to adapt quickly -- this is why they need such solutions. My take is companies will do well to manage the life of IP sessions and if Primal Solutions becomes the dominant player in this space, perhaps we can ask them nicely to spin off a division focusing on personal income tax. April 15th always seems to be just around the corner.
INDUSTRIES
Activate Email 
