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The telecommunications industry in India is growing at a staggering rate, emerging in early 2008 as the world's second-largest telecommunications market after China. With more than 250 million mobile and landline subscribers, the explosive growth in the India telecom industry has presented both tremendous opportunities and challenge.

Avoidable loss of revenue, known in the telecom industry as revenue leakage, is a primary concern worldwide. According to a 2007 report commissioned by Subex Ltd., a leading global provider of Operations and Business Support Systems (OSS/BSS) for communications service providers, revenue leakage is steadily increasing. The report, performed by Analysys Research, notes that average leakage worldwide has risen from 12.1 to 13.6 percent of turnover, or more than $175 billion.

Telecom industry losses worldwide come from several sources, including fraud, data-handling errors, poorly optimized call routing, and deficiencies in credit management. Moreover, the introduction of higher-value new services with complex value chains presents more opportunities for fraud. The problems are particularly acute for mobile operators, who increasingly look to external vendors for revenue assurance solutions.

To maximize revenue assurance, Reliance Communications installed the Moneta Revenue Assurance System from Subex on Sun Fire servers from Sun Microsystems. The revenue assurance system provides a comprehensive suite of automated tools and capabilities that help manage processes such as billing and service fulfillment. It helps service providers identify the source of leaks, analyze the extent of the loss, and protect against further leakage. “The combination of Sun Fire systems and Moneta helped us in developing capabilities in our revenue assurance systems to enhance our business intelligence performance. With the combined expertise of Sun's legendary scalability and performance-boosting capacity, RCOM's indepth network and business knowledge, Moneta’s customized software solution system provided a lot of consistency and control in an otherwise volatile industry," explains Arindam Chattopadhyay, Reliance Communications, Head IT Projects.

By installing Subex's Moneta solution on Sun servers, Reliance could take advantage of the high server performance and speed needed to process high volumes of transactions and deliver timely results. The scalable, flexible solution will also grow with the company and adapt with changing business needs. Reliance installed eight Sun Fire X4600 M2 servers with eight CPUs and additional Sun Fire x64 servers running the Solaris 10 Operating System. At the core of the new solution, the Sun Fire X4600 M2 server, with its record-breaking performance, features a modular design that makes upgrading to future quad-core processor technologies easier. The servers support up to 256GB of memory, which accelerates data access and analysis. Vinod Kumar, Subex Ltd, President – Revenue Maximization Business Unit notes, “The telecommunications industry operates in a highly dynamic and competitive environment. This makes it imperative for telecom operators to not only introduce innovative solutions and services but also to minimize losses arising out of leakages in revenues, and thus stay ahead of competition. Sun’s superior products when combined with the industry leading Moneta Revenue Assurance System, provide telecom operators with the needed agility to accelerate service life cycles to respond to increasing market demands, while also helping them to maximize revenues.”

The revenue assurance software module has two primary components: the Moneta Stream Controller server and the Moneta Task Controller server. Reliance chose Sun Fire X4600 M2 servers to take advantage of its high-speed because straight-line speed is critical for the Moneta module. One server, installed as the stream controller server, handles queries and serves as the input point for more than a billion daily events. The other seven Sun Fire X4600 M2 servers are installed as the task controller servers, which process more than a billion Call Detail Records (CDRs) per day and carry a parsing rate of approximately 1,000 records per second and a loading rate of approximately 20,000 records per second with back-end storage solution.

The solution provides better insight into revenue chain processes by delivering near real-time data for operational metrics. Reliance uses the information to help predict imminent problems, assess deviations, and minimize revenue leakage. “Revenue assurance has emerged as a key focus area for all telecom service providers given the fact that it has a direct impact on their bottom-line. Sun Microsystems’ strong telecom expertise and solution offering that revolves around Solaris 10 provides a compelling proposition to telecom service providers and helps them strengthen their operational efficiencies and maximize their revenue inflows. Partnering with Subex Systems to provide such an offering to RCOM is yet another example of Sun’s leadership in the telecom infrastructure space in India,” says Ramesh Mamgain, Sun Microsystems, Director of Telecom.

With high-performance systems and better business intelligence tools, the company is more agile and can respond faster to the dynamic telecom market. Reliance now has the confidence to rapidly launch next-generation services needed to build revenue and stay ahead of the competition. And just as important, it can now proactively identify and respond to potential revenue leakage.

 
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