With its most recent acquisition of Connexn's Certo revenue assurance platform fully integrated, Azure Solutions launched its next-generation platform with Inter-Party management at 3GSM this week in Cannes, France.

Committed customers plan to implement Azure's Inter-Party management solution over the next few months to manage real-time rating, billing and partner management for next-generation services.

Inter-party trading, margins, integrity, fraud and security management of 3G services will be more complex than before. Azure's enhanced revenue-assurance portfolio can provide operators with the real-time financial and operational control to reduce potential revenue leakage and maximize profitability.

"We have a strong but simple vision for operators. Our mission is that every operator collects every cent owed to them," said John Cronin, president and CEO of Azure.

Azure, or the group that now comprises it, began operation about a dozen years ago inside BT. The company was spun off in 2003 and has approximately 220 employees.

"Azure is not just a software company, Cronin said. "We are telco and software people solving telco problems. Our revenue assurance product was developed by a telco for a telco."

The Azure solution validates data integrity in order for operators to be able to trade and interact online and more effectively manage clients, suppliers and cash flow in a complex value chain. It puts integrity management systems in place to ensure the data and provide fraud and security management. Inter-Party Management reinforces Azure's existing event-integrity capability with the help of Connexn's Certo platform, which it acquired in November of last year.

Cronin said he is delighted with the Certo acquisition. "It filled the gaps for our customers' requirements and by all analysis was the best tool on the market."

The Certo integration adds the real-time revenue assurance component to Azure's platform for next-generation services. The platform now includes solutions for revenue assurance, fraud, interconnection and route optimization. It helps validate revenue streams from next-generation, 3G and IP-based networks.

Nick Milner, chief marketing officer at Azure, considers revenue leakage to be the value of telecom traffic and services that are not collected and revenue assurance as the systems and processes that identify and stem the losses.

Certo uses advanced process automation to provide end-to-end visibility and control of the full revenue life cycle. It can interface with existing revenue assurance applications and provides a single monitoring and control mechanism for operators to preserve and grow the value of their existing revenue assurance investments.

In a recent survey conducted for Azure by Analysys called "Global Operator Attitudes to Revenue Assurance Survey 2004," the company found that mobile operators, in particular, need to take revenue leakage more seriously.

Survey results show that mobile operators are continuing to lose significantly more revenue than their fixed-line counterparts. Analysys surveyed 100 operators on revenue loss and concluded that average global-revenue losses in the telecom sector were now 10.7%. When broken down by operator type, it showed that the average mobile operator loses more revenue (11.7 per cent) than the average fixed-line operator.

"We've seen a lot of companies try to position themselves as revenue assurance companies and, in fact, many of them have a product or service that does stem the loss from one source of leakage," Milner said. "But we know that telcos leak from lots of different causes, not from one big problem."

Fraud from other operators, internal and other external fraud, interconnection, poor systems integration, improper application of new products, prices and credit management were responsible for more revenue loss for mobile operators. Over 20% of the total revenue lost by mobile operators is due to fraud alone. Operators believe that losses will mount over the coming year.

"Telcos are more pessimistic about losses over the next 12 months than they were a year ago about the 21 months just gone by," Milner said.

Yet, the report also discloses that only 30% of operators use external revenue assurance support. Azure aims to reverse that trend with its newly expanded revenue assurance portfolio.