Increasing sales in the billing
and charging sector

Helping our telco software vendor client win $5 million in new business within 12 months after our due diligence process.

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Our Client’s Problem
Our client is a leading telecoms software vendor, and was intending to gain a greater market share in the billing and charging market. To do this, they needed to perform Due Diligence on what it perceived as a potential shift in sales activity in the space, particularly from one mature vendor.  

 

This large vendor’s billing and charging solution presented a significant challenge to our client, who asked us to perform due diligence on them to ensure that they could effectively increase their market share and win RFPs at several Tier 1 and 2 customers that were about to begin their tendering process.

Our Brief
We were asked to do a deep dive into this major vendor’s product architecture, features and solutions. Our client wanted to understand the full scope of the vendor's solutions capability, including:

1. Its current offering in terms of its billing system, charging system, and CRM.

2. What the company was investing in the the B/OSS space outside of billing and charging.

3. Whether the charging and billing systems supported public cloud.

4. Whether the solution was containerized or run on VMs.

5. Whether it supported microservices architectures.

6. Whether the system was refactored or a modernized legacy solution.

7. How was 5G charging supported.

8. Which database was being used, which catalog was used. 

The client also had questions regarding the vendor’s release cadence including what was included in the latest release, whether customers were obligated to upgrade, and effort (in hours and dollar value). 
 

Our Method
At 4D, the depth of our research is at the core of all of our undertakings. Technology vendors will often advertise their solutions but will rarely reveal their architecture, and secondary market research and vendor websites rarely have detailed information on the extent of offerings such as 5G use cases, catalog details, and more.  
 

Using our extensive database of contacts, 4D searched its network for two ex-employees of the vendor working in both the product and sales teams so they could provide verified accounts of the vendor’s billing and charging solution.
 

Having sourced these ex-employees, 4D conducted a series of in-depth interviews by our experienced team of analysts, who then helped compile our report on the competitor and its solution across multiple recorded sessions where the interviewees took us through architecture diagrams, key account details, the company’s roadmap, and strategy.
 

Client Outcomes
Our due diligence revealed some interesting findings. We found that the major vendor was looking to scale back investments and R&D spend on its rating and charging function. The client knew that the latest release version was over 18 months old, and there wouldn’t be another, and could reassure its potential customers of its own commitment to its products.
 

We also learned that half of the vendor’s solution could not run on the cloud and were not cloud native. Critical configuration components such as product management, offer management, and customer management configuration had to be run from VMs, while the rating and charging configuration module ran on the cloud. This critical piece of information helped our client change its pitch to emphasize the true scalability of its offerings via its own cloud-enabled billing and charging offering, which was appealing to the Tier 1 customers it pitched to and ultimately won.
 

We also found that the vendor had been trying (unsuccessfully) to sell its full stack with its more popular products such as its CRM and Billing system together. We also found many examples of CSPs that had swapped or discontinued their contracts with the vendor, not only allowing our client to more effectively price and pitch its offering during tenders but taught our customer that taking a modular approach to its solution was an effective strategy.

The client began winning clients for individual offerings such as billing and charging, catalog, rather than trying to win contracts to replace customer B/OSS stacks that were often heavily customized to CSPs requirements making them reluctant to switch.

By targeting individual parts of the value chain, our client made over $5 million from 3 new logos in 12 months from using this strategy.

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