Digital drives revenue management market to reach $11.8 bn

Digital payment in IndiaRevenue management system revenue increased 6 percent to $11.8 billion in 2017 — driven mainly by telecom operators’ drive for the acceleration of digital transformation, an IHS Markit report said.

The report said service revenue accounted for 52 percent of the total revenue management market in 2017.

The revenue management system market is forecast to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 2.6 percent to reach $13.4 billion in 2022.

Amdocs, Cisco, Ericsson, HPE, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Juniper, NetCracker, Nokia, Openet, Oracle, SAP and SAS are some of technology companies that will benefit from the growth in revenue management system market.

Research firm Analysys Mason recently said mobile operators in Asia Pacific are making progress in enabling greater engagement capabilities on digital channels.

IHS Markit said the global telecom operators’ numerous network elements have increased operational complexity, affecting their competitiveness against web-scale companies such as Alibaba, Amazon, Apple, Baidu, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Tencent.

Together, these web-scale companies make up over half of total telecom capital expenditures, and they have agile business operations and no operation support system (OSS) or business support system (BSS) to worry about.

Hyperscale firms spent $22 billion on Capex in the final quarter of 2017, bringing the total to almost $75 billion last year. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple and Facebook are the top spenders and together they spent over $13 billion per quarter in 2017, says Synergy Research.

“Mobile service providers are trying to catch up by transforming the way they engage with their customers, including the way they mediate, charge, bill and collect — all key functions of their revenue management system,” Stephane Teral, executive research director, mobile infrastructure and carrier economics, IHS Markit, said.

Analysys Mason said Asia Pacific’s operators such as Digi and Optus enabled functionality such as message-based support within the smartphone app. Spark and XL Axiata implemented the ability to purchase new services as part of digital plans. Optus has the ability to offer personalised deals based on customers’ usage.

IHS Markit said virtualization, cloud and big data are the pillars of this digital transformation journey, and revenue management systems are becoming cloud based, driving demand for software products and services.

The report said revenue management systems are required to run in virtualized environments and interface with cloud or orchestration elements to enable automated scalability and self-healing activities.

The journey toward cloud-native applications is associated with microservices and the use of DevOps methodologies that change the way software versions are being delivered. Revenue management systems must offer continuous integration and delivery to keep pace with digital operations.

Baburajan K