VanillaPlus, Bill & Charge - Insight Report, July 2015

BILL & CHARGE Are CSPs ready for an on-demand, real-time world?

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ANALYST REPORT

The authors are Karl Whitelock, the director of global strategy for Operations, Orchestration, Data Analysis and Monetisation (ODAM) at Stratecast | Frost & Sullivan (left) and Troy Morley, strategy analyst for ODAM at Stratecast | Frost & Sullivan (right)

Introduction

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ntil approximately four years ago, automation of the charging and billing processes centred almost exclusively on the business-to-consumer (B2C) model in support of millions of customers. The largest part of any mobile and fixed-line communications service provider (CSP) business today continues to focus on the business challenges from consumers. And for good reason.

Addressing the service and billing needs of millions of customers is not easy and comes with multiple business challenges Globally, the vast majority of consumers receive broadband access through a mobile network operator. But, customers continue to ask why is it so hard for these operators to offer services through the same type of self-care mechanism as internet-based retailers do and at the speed of the internet as well? Must all customers subscribe to the same data plan offerings? Are pick and choose service options something of a nirvana that cannot be delivered by the global CSP community at large? Are there alternative ways to pay the bill for service access beyond a pre-defined pricing plan or prepaid data usage bucket? From these and several other questions, it is easy to see that what customers really want is a better experience based

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on their expectations from working with internet retailers and ecommerce providers.

Billing and charging solutions installed to address the consumer services market more than five to seven years ago were implemented as solution silos tied to support for a particular type of network technology, with little thought about the overall customer experience involving services from potentially multiple service silos such as voice, broadband and video. These systems contain multiple databases, duplicated functionality, and are integrated through rigidly-defined business processes. But times have changed and business requirements today are much more complex. In

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Figure 1: The global communications marketplace is at the centre of the transformation experience strategy of all other industries

fact, it is not uncommon to hear the frustration of CSP chief marketing officers (CMOs) – the installed business and operations support systems, especially the monetisation systems, are constraining the CMO’s ability to increase revenue by attracting new customers and in introducing new services.

Enter the world of real-time monetisation solutions designed around the customer experience. These new solutions incorporate the benefits of policy management with real-time rating and charging along with contextual awareness and near instantaneous customer notification. Discussion about the real-time world of charging and billing for consumer services is the first part of this story.

Though very important, B2C (business-to-consumer) is not the full billing and charging story the communications marketplace must address today.

With the advent of cloud services, some of the billing industry momentum tied to consumers has shifted to the back office business-to-business (B2B) relationships that make complex services work for the B2C marketplace. B2B wholesale

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relationships are the lifeblood for any large business or enterprise. However, the operations and monetisation needs of the B2B world are similar, but still different, from those that support B2C retail services.

In the pursuit of providing customers a better experience, most industries are not only blending mobile communications capabilities with the goods and services they have always delivered, but network technology advances, computing dynamics and data storage capacity are allowing them to bring to market solutions that extend well beyond their traditional business focus. Such new market solutions include shopping malls that bring customers and retailers together through online access, to better facilitate customer interaction.

Other solutions involve healthcare institutions that provide gourmet cooking clinics as part of a patient’s wellness programme; automobiles with mobile access; insurance services based on consumption and driver performance; and support of other customer needs within industries such as public services, education, publishing, financial services, logistics and the transportation sector.

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ANALYST REPORT

Figure 2: Real-time charging and revenue management systems for consumer billing

Multi-part business ecosystems are redefining how the communications marketplace of the future will address the needs of industry from the Internet of Things (IoT) solutions to virtual services offerings. Operations and monetisation capabilities within the B2B world form the second part of the charging and billing story.

Consumer-focused B2C charging and billing The global billing solution supplier community has done a good job with delivering systems that can address the end-to-end billing process for the consumer-based marketplace. However, most installed solutions lack a real-time element, and have grown together in a tightly woven architecture that was never designed to address rapid change or market-based service innovation. In fact, most CSPs believe the greatest business challenge they presently face in meeting the needs of new business opportunity is directly linked to the multi-system business solution environment they now maintain. Timely change management and system redefinition often fall short of expectations, especially when modifications across multivendor functions require market-speed flexibility.

Many CSPs still have multi-vendor business solution architectures Today’s competitive mobile services environment involves applications, content and cloud services suppliers working with network operators to rapidly deliver innovative, optimised, and

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value-added customer service offerings. For many CSPs, installed systems and processes no longer meet the needs of today’s business environment. Yet, today, rapidly-emerging competitors are making a big play for customer attention, customer mindshare, customer loyalty and the customer’s pocketbook. CSP competitors such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, have a very different IT-systems mindset and solution structure that enables a fast and adaptable response to customer needs, and rapid optimisation capabilities developed in the internet industry.

CSP systems have remained divided into functionality sets tied to various business processes from their earliest beginnings.

The end-to-end monetisation process, often supported through a multi-vendor best-of-breed environment, consists of mediation, policy management, rating and charging, invoicing, collections, customer notifications, partner settlements and now, usage insight analysis. This environment provides a powerful ability to address the needs of millions of customers with a relatively small number of service offerings. However, when business change is rampant, and competitive pressures are significant, a lack of configurable systems and flexible processes fails to satisfy rapidly emerging customer opportunities. This level of change often requires simultaneous updates across all systems. In spite of disparate IT systems suppliers’ valiant efforts to keep pace with change, agility and flexibility is simply not practical in a multi-vendor and multisystem integrated architecture.

Systems silos across several customer management,

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monetisation and service assurance processes operate in a less than optimally-defined solution definition environment.

Systems silos tend to create data duplication issues, functionality mismatches, cost excesses, upgrade complexity, slow responsiveness to market change and, ultimately, dissatisfied customers.

To interact, monitor and understand end-user behaviour requires real-time functions and services such as real-time selfservice and real-time policy-enabled charging. Real-time enduser interaction is also required for contextual customer notifications and optimal offer conversion. This user engagement capability is a critical gap that is significantly limited by mobile carriers in comparison to internet services competitors.

An inflexible monetisation environment is no longer conducive to meeting the rapidly-changing business needs defined by new network technologies, virtual networking and virtual data centre services. A lack of responsiveness from existing systems and processes leaves a gap that can negatively affect the way new business models are enacted and consumer needs are addressed. If left unchecked, such gaps will result in missed commitments, lost opportunities and unmet financial objectives.

Cloud-based mobile services enablement architecture With the realization of cloud-based software solution technology, important differences exist between what can be delivered by traditionally integrated multi-system, multi-supplier business support architectures, and what is now possible through a cloud-based, single supplier design focused on the needs of mobile customers.

To compete in an increasingly aggressive market, CSPs should consider a solution in the newly emerged category of customerengaged mobile services enablement. The three defining elements of this architecture are: • Agile cloud-based service platform – To enable service agility and service innovation, CSPs need to move key mobile business support functions to a single integrated business logic stack and database. For operational efficiency and rapid responsiveness to change, this stack should reside in a cloud-based environment defined by a single supplier. A

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multi-supplier cloud-based configuration would be subject to the same limitations that presently-deployed solution architectures suffer when a rapid response to changing market conditions is needed. A single supplier cloud-based approach always provides a solution with the most recent features and functions. This integrated stack is not related to network functions virtualisation (NFV), which is tied to the network traffic plane.

• Contextual user engagement – To efficiently reach the customer, the solution stack includes a new architecture element – the user engagement platform – which is essential and fundamentally designed to work with on-device, realtime user experience software to: - Sense the current real-time context of the user: what is the user doing now?

- Deliver real-time, on-device interaction, based on user context, to help users understand their service or ecommerce options; and to complete transactions including service purchases based on those options.

- Be definable by business logic in the back-end, and be adaptable in real-time.

- Set mobile services policy to address issues concerning network efficiency.

- Provide on-device, out-of-the-box, account and device activation capability.

• Integrated service creation environment – To truly allow service innovation by the network operator, the system must be managed by a single, secure web environment to allow a small team of marketing and IT professionals to very quickly design, beta test, perfect and commercially launch the following aspects for services and ecommerce offers: - Service plan offering catalogue, service allowances for each plan, pricing for each plan, on-device catalogue appearance/branding for each plan, on-device contextual marketing triggers for offering plans and services with immediate user actionable notifications.

- ecommerce offering catalogue with pricing and contextual marketing triggers for offering ecommerce goods and services on-device.

- On-device marketing via user interface (UI) notification definitions, and contextual trigger conditions to present

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ANALYST REPORT

actionable marketing offers.

- Integrated segmentation capability for targeted services, and improved monetisation and sub-brand creation, plus micro segmentation for agile new service testing.

Major reductions in IT vendor costs accrue when moving from a multi-vendor, hardware-based architecture with high IT project costs, to a cloud-based, single supplier service creation solution. In addition, a rapid service definition and deployment process allows CMOs to validate winning services ideas with customers, which reduces the cost associated with launching new services. It also eliminates the sizeable percentage of the IT and marketing budgets associated with unsuccessful service launches. Such actions free resources for promoting the most proven services on a larger scale.

The benefits from a cloud-based mobile services enablement solution A cloud-based mobile services enablement architecture would be comprised of various software modules that display solution flexibility when market conditions change or customer service preferences transform. The solution would involve customer interaction and reduce the need for custom software development. It would also sharply decrease the time-to-market needed by more traditional approaches. The advantages of this type of mobile enablement solution are: • On-device presence and user engagement – Within a cloud-based business solution construct, on-device user engagement and ecommerce enablement can be designed into the mobile services solution. User context awareness, analytics and on-device policy enhancement can all be made available. Incorporating these functions in a common set of business logic and tightly integrated functional modules results in a holistic architectural approach to a mobile operator’s business needs. This solution environment can also deliver flexible service offerings and ecommerce capabilities at a lower implementation cost compared to traditionally defined solutions. Most, if not all, of the

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functionality to support new service ideas is already included in the solution.

• Best of breed service experience – Modern mobile bornin-the-cloud competitors and cloud-client solution providers have used the power of devices to uplift their value proposition towards end-users. By incorporating different categories of devices into the design of a solution, a more elegant and compelling user experience is developed to engage customers; for example, discovering new services in a contextual fashion, enabling a one-click purchase customer journey and transforming the perceived value of the CSP offering.

• Solution flexibility and agility – A cloud-based, singlesupplier, mobile services environment would manage all aspects of service policy, rating and charging, ecommerce and user engagement through a seamless set of business logic, without the functional boundaries imposed by API integrations. Through this approach, end-users are exposed to new service offerings via a product catalogue. The catalogue can address individualised customer service plans, and handle any level of change without incorporating the time-consuming step of an IT project to define, update, test and then release software each time change is needed. In addition, on-device user content can be incorporated to qualify all aspects of network policy, self-help user interaction, and ecommerce offers. The cloud-based mobile services approach delivers a seamless end-to-end design of service and user experience.

• Rapid innovation through an integrated service creation environment – All aspects of network policy, pricing, charging and on-device user self-care for new service offers are programmed into a single graphical service design and deployment environment. This type of approach eliminates IT project time – and cost – associated with updating each system and API definition. The cloud-based mobile service architecture and service creation environment enables CSPs

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to rapidly create, test, optimise and then launch new consumer services in a matter of weeks rather than the months that are typical when defining new services through the traditional service creation process.

The rapid service design model, which an integrated, cloud-based, mobile services solution enables, allows a CSP to market-test and optimise multiple service offerings in the time a traditional monetisation architecture could launch a single service. This technology actually eliminates certain steps within the traditional service delivery model because the rapid design model incorporates some service creation steps as built in capabilities.

Another advantage of the rapid service design model is that multiple service ideas can be tested simultaneously with different customer groups, thereby accelerating the pace of responsiveness to changing market conditions. Still another advantage for any CSP engaging in this rapid service design approach would be quick recognition by its customer base as an innovator of services and capabilities designed by direct customer feedback. Such a label is what breeds customer loyalty.

Enterprise-engaged B2B charging and billing CSPs are challenged today to address the billing needs of bundled network services such as voice, text messaging and data access for their consumer and small business customers.

They have the added challenge of profitably providing broadband connectivity to their enterprise customers; and managing multiple B2B relationships with solution partners for several new business endeavours – some of which include mcommerce, cloud-based virtual services, IoT communications and enterprise use of mobility services within their product offerings to deliver a more enhanced experience for their customers. Monetising this complexity, including compensation to a growing number of business solution partners as revenue is received from customers, means that CSPs must adopt new business strategies, new business models and new business

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management solutions. • B2B services need flexibility and negotiable pricing Enterprises demand personalised and individualised contracts containing service definitions and pricing agreements that are unique to the organisation. In addition to usage-based charges, enterprise monthly billing requirements involve complex components such as service packaging and pricing without restrictions, monetisation of managed services, and pricing based on a variety of business models. Addressing these needs requires a flexible and configurable approach to service selection, pricing and usage monitoring.

Enterprise B2B agreements are binding business contracts that define the terms and conditions that an enterprise negotiates with its services supplier for each of its data service and applications options. The contract contains pricing discounts, loyalty focus and payment schedules for these services. In addition, an emerging table-stakes requirement for any deal now is the provider’s ability to show consumption tracking against agreed upon terms. This level of tracking is essential to prevent enterprise-level bill shock and to eliminate endless manual calculations in determining how charges are computed, and whether they are part of an agreement. Automating such tracking capabilities within the regularly delivered enterprise payments invoice would save onsiderable reconciliation time for both the data services provider and the enterprise.

Stratecast believes that enterprise data services providers need the business support infrastructure to innovate their own pricing and selling models; and that they must have the ability to distribute and monetise their offerings to customers and partners in a fully automated manner. Without this capability, these providers will struggle to meet the market demands of an increasing customer base, as they continuously update their customised business support solutions.

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ANALYST REPORT

• Monetisation of enterprise data services is no simple task Enterprise data services take on many forms, and quickly create behind-the-scenes complexity for the service provisioning, business management, and monetisation processes. For example, enterprises typically purchase broadband connectivity from one or more network operators according to geographic coverage needs, pricing flexibility and service availability. This provides evidence from the general enterprise marketplace that CSPs are the best suppliers of network connectivity. Enterprises also purchase data centre services such as unified communications, remote data storage, elastic bandwidth, and computing capacity from one or more cloud services providers. In addition, enterprises purchase cloud-based applications including ERP, customer care, office automation, sales management and specialty applications from these same cloud services providers; or, in some cases, directly from the developer, according to business relationships and service needs.

While some enterprises are now considering network access and virtualised data centre services from a single supplier, setting aside the reasons for this trend and focusing on the enterprise market in general, the most important aspect associated with enterprise customer billing is the need by enterprise customers for unique contract agreements and the tracking of usage to agreement terms.

These agreements are based on numerous factors, such as the enterprise customer’s changing business needs, willingness to spend and flexibility demands pertaining to pricing options, usage discounts, loyalty focus and brand awareness. In addition, there is a high probability that different partners will be involved with the delivery and maintenance of each service combination package that a cloud service provider sells. From a monetisation perspective, this means complexity as services are billed, revenue is collected and partners are compensated.

Managing the impact from multiple terms and conditions for each exchange or use of goods or services – an event – can be complex, but necessary to provide proper accountability

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of charges and distribution of payments. In addition, business needs can change quickly; so, to swiftly negotiate or change agreement terms enables a service provider to differentiate in this complex environment by adapting to the needs of new markets, new business models, or competition.

Given the complexity associated with virtual service offerings, or enterprise-level services of any kind, the monetisation processes should fit the business model a company chooses to run, rather than forcing the business model to match what the billing system can address. Billing systems should also allow a company to define its products and pricing strategies in a way that provides flexibility to react to changing market and customer needs at the speed of business, not at the speed of IT, which is usually measured in weeks or months.

• The key requirements for addressing enterprise B2B billing complexity To better understand the complexities that virtual services now bring, key requirements that a billing solution should address in support of today’s new business realities include: Pricing models – Pricing model support should include on-demand, reserved, usage-based, location-based, free trials, promotions, bundling, peak and off-peak business scenarios.

Usage rating for hybrid clouds – Usage rating must include support for any computing model; allow creation of product bundles from multiple sources; and bill channels or partners for the components defining each.

Chargeback for private clouds – Deliver ability to chargeback or bill IT departments that use transfer pricing and departmental chargeback policies.

Corporate and settlement hierarchies – Allow for configurable billing and settlement hierarchies, including grouped commitments across corporate hierarchies.

Virtual bundle support – Allow service bundle billing

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based on partner contributions and revenue sharing agreements.

Channel compensation and multi-party settlement – Manage channel behavior through creative compensation options – incentives, discounts, and penalties – and support multi-party settlement – retainer, residual, shared, and settled. Settlements should include ability to handle multi-party agreements where a single transaction can involve three or more relationships.

Enterprise agreements – Support individualised negotiation for enterprise agreements.

Online bill – Provide customisable online billing with re-branding for partners and customers.

Dynamic scaling – Dynamically scale to flexibly accommodate peak periods, including bursting from private to public clouds.

Product changes – Ability to change product pricing quickly – in hours or at most days – to respond to market demand and competition positioning.

Combined payments processing – Account for enterprise customer billing and third-party payments, commissions and incentives from the same platform.

SLA enforcement – Provide automated support for contract commitments tied to service level agreements (SLAs). Though this is less of a function of billing and more a concern of the service delivery and quality of service processes, it is an important topic for network operators and cloud providers. Regardless of the exact terms and conditions an SLA agreement may require, a clear audit path defining all billing-related customer charges and partner settlement payments is essential for not only the customer and partner management processes, but the SLA management function as well. Beyond both of these, such detailed accountability is mandatory to satisfy corporate governance requirements.

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Conclusion Digital service personalisation has changed the course of direction for nearly all CSPs throughout the world.

Unfortunately, most installed systems do not allow them to react to changing market conditions quickly enough to take full advantage of the opportunities the market now provides.

The longer-term billing implication is that as customer services are consumed, all parts of the end-to-end service definition and supply chain process must be reconciled in shorter and shorter intervals. To achieve future business success, it is imperative that new service offers and new business models not be saddled with the limitations of currently defined systems that can not show a high degree of flexibility and configurability along with the business processes they support.

Some billing suppliers understand the changing business landscape, inside and outside the communications sector, and are now satisfying those needs with solutions originally intended to address complexities found only within the communications industry. The difference between suppliers that can support the billing needs of multiple industries, lies in how these systems are engineered. The complexities of the continuously changing CSP environment, to include simultaneous support for multiple business models will no doubt affect the way billing suppliers meet the future needs of this changing environment.

If a single billing solution, initially made for the communications industry, can simultaneously address hundreds of business models that define the operations needs of complex enterprises in multiple industries, such as a large international airport today, imagine what could be accomplished with a similar solution in meeting the business relationship and monetisation needs of business strategies yet to be defined.

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COMPANY PROFILES

Company summary

Company summary

Founded

1982

Founded

1999

HQ

Chesterfield, Missouri, United States

HQ

Dublin, Ireland

Employees

More than 22,000

Employees

More than 800

Revenue

US$3,564 million (2014)

Revenue

Undisclosed

Customers

Over 250 CSPs in 80 countries worldwide. Key customers include: AT&T, Bell Canada, BT, Comcast, Deutsche Telecom, MetroPCS, Sprint, Telefónica, T-Mobile, Verizon and Vodafone.

Customers

Partnerships

Strategic partnerships with EMC, HP and IBM. A wide range of partnerships with systems integrators and independent software vendors.

Key customers include: AT&T, A1 Telekom Austria, Bell, Charter Communications, CTBC, Orange Group, Softbank, Sprint, Telus, Time Warner Cable, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless, Videotron and Vodafone.

Partnerships

A wide range of partnerships with equipment vendors, systems integrators and independent software suppliers.

Financial Status

Privately held

Financial Status

Publicly Traded (NASDAQ:DOX)

Bill and charge products Amdocs Customer Amdocs CES brings together a full suite of Experience OSS/BSS functionality, including revenue Solutions (CES) management. A selection of revenue management related offerings include: • Amdocs Convergent Charging – Real-time convergent charging across all services, networks and customer types.

• Amdocs Policy Controller – Serves as the policy decision function, providing real-time usage metering, and service control for advanced data services. Ties in closely with the convergent charging engine.

• Amdocs Master Enterprise Catalogue – Centralised data repository that manages all products defined through various CES modules and external OSS/BSS. • Amdocs Mediation – The mediation platform supports all networks, services and processing modes. It operates in real-time or batch mode, with active or passive interaction.

• Amdocs Partner Management – Provides a comprehensive partner management and settlement system to support the complete partnership lifecycle.

• Amdocs Invoicing – Creates all charges, including recurring charges, discounts, taxes and invoice totals.

• Amdocs Accounts Receivable – Enables CSPs to gain an instant and accurate snapshot of their financial position at any given time.

• Amdocs Collection – Facilitates an accurate and manageable collection process.

Bill and charge products Openet Fusionworks Framework

High performance framework utilised by all of the company’s modular software products. The framework centralises common functionality, provides support for custom logic and eases integration.

Openet Policy Manager

Enables CSPs to dynamically control network resources with real-time policies based on service, subscriber, or usage context. These policy rules do not just control network capacity and quality of service, but also enable new business models and innovative new services.

Openet Evolved Charging

Pre-integrated with the Openet Policy Manager, Openet Evolved Charging can be deployed as a standalone online charging system or as an adjunct system. It supports spend alerts to reduce bill shock, dynamic pricing models with real-time notification triggers, shared device plans with usage dashboards, and service bundling – for fixed and mobile, family plans and dual persona enterprise plans.

Openet Convergent Mediation

An enterprise-wide platform with the scalability and configurability to address the billing mediation, network event processing and data collection challenges within fragmented and diverse operator networks.

Key differentiation and competitive pressures Key differentiation and competitive pressures Amdocs meets the OSS BSS functionality needs of any size of CSP as shown by its current customer base. The Amdocs CES solution modules operate as pre-integrated suites or as standalones according to functional need. Amdocs features a global services organistion to install and operate its solutions. The company has a strong innovative spirit that allows it to address the needs of any organisation, while maintaining a leadership position within the global billing marketplace.

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Openet offers a real-time data collection, analysis and management solution capable of addressing both customer experience and business management needs. Its data management capabilities can be configured to address multiple mediation, rating and charging, or policy requirements. The company has proven it can deliver on the data management challenges for some of the largest CSPs in the world.

Competition within the rating, charging, mediation and now data analysis domain space is fierce, but Openet continues to remain aggressive and innovative in addressing the changing needs of the communications marketplace.

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Company summary Founded

1996

HQ

Vienna, Virginia, United States

Employees

160

Revenue

Undisclosed

Customers

Global customer base includes tier one CSPs and OTT providers in Asia, Europe, North America and South America. Key customers are: América Móvil, AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, Twilio, Sprint, Switchco, Telefónica and Verizon.

Partnerships

The Telarix Technology Alliance Partner Programme includes: Amdocs, Arptel, Ascom, IceHook, NxtGn, PurgeFraud and XConnect.

Financial Status

Privately held

Bill and charge products Telarix iXTools

The company’s solutions focus on wholesale charging and billing. A selection of revenue management functions addressed by the iXTools suite include: • iXBill – Ensures billable activities are captured, rated and billed, allowing CSPs to address agreement types and rating scenarios such as multi-party settlements and revenue sharing partnerships.

• iXConnect – Is a business intelligence platform, for collecting and managing information. iXConnect defines and manages agreements between CSPs and partners, and applies rates to different types of traffic within the scope of each agreement.

• iXRoute – Enables CSPs to identify and implement optimal routing strategies, to keep the network profitable.

• iXTrade – Allows CSPs to simplify and automate the buying, pricing and selling processes within the wholesale interconnect business.

• iXAudit – Streamlines the validation of interconnect invoices, reconcile charges, and manage settlements.

Telarix iXLink iXLink is an information exchange platform that enables CSPs to automate the exchange of business documents for the interconnect processes and to electronically share documents, such as pricing quotes, rate and dial code changes, numbering plans, invoices and declarations. iXLink has more than 4,000 members with 40 million transactions monthly.

Key differentiation and competitive pressures Telarix addresses what it calls interconnect business optimisation, which aims for more efficient carrier-to-carrier relationships through its portfolio of wholesale solutions. iXTools can be a pre-integrated suite or delivered as standalone modules. The iXLink exchange service allows members to apply business rules that are specific to each partner and/or service to validate transactions, meet internal business objectives and capture errors so that the sender can be notified immediately. Telarix is a market leader within the wholesale charging and billing domain, though it continues to face competitive pressure from other suppliers and clearinghouses.

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About Stratecast Stratecast collaborates with our clients to reach smart business decisions in the rapidly evolving and hyper-competitive Information and Communications Technology markets. Using a mix of action-oriented subscription research and customised consulting engagements, Stratecast delivers knowledge and perspective that is only attainable through years of real-world experience in an industry where customers are collaborators; today’s partners are tomorrow’s competitors; and agility and innovation are essential elements for success. Contact your Stratecast Account Executive to engage our experience to assist you in attaining your growth objectives.

About Frost & Sullivan Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, works in collaboration with clients to utilise visionary innovation that addresses the global challenges and related growth opportunities that will make or break today’s market participants. For more than 50 years, we have been developing growth strategies for the Global 1000, emerging businesses, the public sector and the investment community. Is your organisation prepared for the next profound wave of industry convergence, disruptive technologies, increasing competitive intensity, Mega Trends, breakthrough best practices, changing customer dynamics and emerging economies? For more information about Frost & Sullivan’s Growth Partnership Services, visit www.frost.com.

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