An obviously very comprehensive report has just been published on the ‘state of the billing market.’ The report, by Information Communication Technology predicts that the market for a wide range of communications billing – and revenue management – software will grow from $7.80 billion in 2014, to $11.78 billion by 2019.
This is clearly good news.
According to the summary, the demand is driven by “subscriber growth in developing countries, and improved customer experience with real-time charging information.” The biggest share of the market will come from Asia Pacific, followed by Europe and the Middle East. The biggest change will be the number of cloud billing implementations. This will not be new to most in our industry.
The curious thing about this report, which weighs in at $5,000 (so BillingViews decided against actually buying it) is the companies that the report profiles. The ones that we would expect are all there and include Accenture, Alcatel-Lucent, Amdocs, Comverse, Ericsson, HP, Huawei, NEC (including presumably Netcracker), Oracle and SAP.
Bearing in mind, though, that real time charging is noted as a major trend, it is odd that the specialist real time charging companies are not included – names such as Openet are missing, who have very large customers in this space. Missing too, are Matrixx, with recent real time wins in Australasia. Bango, Aria (now being mentioned by big telcos as one to watch) and the subscription based billers such as Zuora and Transverse, just back in the office from a recent funding round are not mentioned in the table of contents. Also absent are newcomers with muscle, such as AsiaInfo, with a Chinese background that is turning into success in Europe. And where is mid-tier craftsman (and subscription biller) Cerillion. Also missing is the new heavyweight Redknee. One has to wonder whether the predictions would have been affected by profiling these companies.
It would be interesting to see whether the report covers the impact of SDN and NFV on the billing market. We feel that it is something that should, for once, not be left until after the fact before making sure all is in place.
Perhaps these issues are covered in the report itself, but we could only find reference to ‘cloud’ in the extensive list of contents. If anyone has read the report it would be good to see if these key topics are included.
Oh, and what about payments? Most Billing Directors also handle Payments.
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