Azure, Agilent Team to Extend Revenue Assurance Platform

Revenue assurance vendor Azure Solutions Inc. has joined forces with Agilent Technologies Inc. to market Azure’s Certo platform and Agilent’s acceSS7 monitoring system as one solution.

The acceSS7 network monitoring system captures, stores and enriches SS7 records of all network transactions for voice and data services. Azure’s Certo platform and revenue assurance applications now will use these enriched signaling records to determine actual service usage and reconcile revenues. In contrast, most telecom operators rely on switch or billing system data as a reference, but with billions of service usage records passing through multiple systems, interfaces and organizational boundaries, the risk of record corruption or loss is significant, the companies argue.

“End-to-end revenue integrity begins with an independent source of information,” says Jason Briggs, program manager for Yankee Group. “When performing revenue assurance analysis on telephony usage, this independent information source is the SS7 record. Increasingly, we see revenue assurance departments recognizing the SS7 record independence and are using SS7 as [a] core component of their usage accuracy analysis.”

The Certo platform, recently acquired along with Connexn Technologies Inc., offers automatic detection and correction of data integrity errors that cause revenue leakage, extra costs and customer dissatisfaction, for increased profitability and confidence in financial reporting, the company says. It also helps customers to meet reporting regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

“By using both products, telecommunications providers have a complete solution that ensures the accuracy of usage data from network-to-bill,” says Steven Bruny, president of Azure Solutions, and the previous COO of Connexn. “With Agilent’s acceSS7 monitoring platform and our revenue assurance solution, carriers will be able to readily identify, correct and recoup not only lost revenue, but also hidden costs that often are undetected and impact the bottom line.”

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