Telefonica Spain is doubling its investment in pricing analysis technology from Redknee, to allow it to generate more precise business intelligence about its business and consumer customer segments.
Redknee CEO Lucas Skoczkowski said that he also expects to see other Telefonica properties in Europe and Latin America step up their investment in Redknee’s products and services. Redknee’s other Spanish customers – Vodafone, Orange and KPN – are already in active discussions to do so, Skoczkowski added.
Redknee founded its presence in Spain through the acquisition last year of Madrid-based Nimbus Systems for €11.25 million. The software vendor said that Telefonica Spain will spend double the amount with it this year compared to last year, adding customer segements and increased funtionalities to Redknee’s Price Simulator package.
Explaining this rising interest in detailed customer analysis, such as that performed by Redknee’s Price Simulator package, Skoczkowski said, “Operators are looking to drive a lot higher efficiency, and more understanding, of how to best tailor their businesses to extract more value from each of their customer segments: so precision becomes much more important. Historically there has been sufficient room in the market so that precision wasn’t necessarily the operating word.”
That has changed, however, and operators are under greater pressure to identify new customer segments, and address those with the most efficient and profitable tariffs and bundles.
“What we are looking for is agility but with more precision. Sometimes you can create something speedily but lack the precision to ensure you get the result the CFO of the company expects. We see Price Simulator as a really great way to have a very specific ability added to the operator’s business which then ties into both marketing and finance roles in the organisation.”
With operators seeing increased competition for certain demographic segments, there is more motivation to provide detailed forecasts and analysis of the impacts of certain tariffs within specific customer segments – and benchmark that against other tariffs.
“All operators are looking at how they can drive an increased understanding of the interaction between complex tariff bundles and the profitability of a sub-segment. When we run reports we not only allow our customers to understand how profitable segments are but also how that compares to all other tariffs from their competitors in that market. That means you can say not only if a tariff is likely to be good for you as a business, but you can use it to differentiate, and be sure you have a chance to be successful in a segment,” Skoczkowski said.
Skoczkowski added tha Redknee was looking to deepen its activity within operators with Price Simulator by highlighting the benefits of implement the software in alliance with Redknee’s Converged Billing services.
“The beauty of what Price Simulator does is that it outputs a bunch of proposed high efficiency bundles that can be auto provisioned into our Converged Billing platform. So if you deploy Price Simulator along with our Converged Billing solution you can achieve very quick and precise iterations of how you can try to maximise your market share of the segments you desire to be present in.”
Skoczkowski said that Redknee was experiencing 40% year on year growth, in a market that “is not quite where it was back in 2008 from a mood indicator perspective”.
“The reason why we have seen growth is that by working with customers and supplying them with critical platforms we are able to extract very good ROI for the operators and give them a sustainable competitive advantage in their geography.”