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Highdeal
Announces Results of 2004 Challenge Campaign
Insight
into Service Providers' pricing & bundling needs
New
York, December 16, 2004 – Launched earlier this
year at Billing & OSS World, the Highdeal Challenge has
sought to identify service providers' most innovative pricing & bundling
scenarios, along with the associated operational challenges. With
the successful conclusion of this inaugural campaign, Highdeal
is announcing the findings.
Based
on feedback from hundreds of service providers, ranging in
size from Tier Ones to greenfield start-ups, offering a wide
range of broadband, mobile and on demand services, the highest
levels of innovation resided with new mobile and IP-enabled
offerings. New services often lack a common pricing
standard and present both the greatest innovation and the greatest
challenges. Product management and marketing organizations
are facing often conflicting objectives:
- Maximize
profitability & average revenue per user
- Stimulate
demand
- Provide
transparency & simplicity
- Differentiate
the offer
These conflicting objectives are driving
higher levels of pricing & bundling innovation. While
traditional services, like voice communications, have been priced & packaged
based on time, distance and time of day, even the basis of the
charge can be an issue with emerging services.
According to Cameron McClearn, Principal,
Strategic Pricing Group, “Highdeal's findings are consistent
with our own experience. New services present a unique
set of challenges requiring a disciplined pricing process, an
ability to accommodate different pricing metrics that align with
value delivered, and infrastructure that enables the rapid testing
and launch of diverse pricing and offer models.”
The mobile services that reflect the greatest
pricing & bundling innovation include multimedia messaging
(MMS) and push-to-talk (PTT). Operators seeking to establish
new revenue streams from these services often fear cannibalizing
their existing voice and messaging revenues. Within the
North American mobile industry, there is a growing focus on prepaid,
resulting from the emergence of the MVNO business model and pay-as-you-go
offers targeted at youth markets.
In the broadband market, innovation centers
around VoIP, IPTV and bundled triple play offers. For
example, video providers are offering greater choice to customers
through themed tiers and more a la carte options. Meanwhile,
both cable operators and telcos are offering bundled voice, data
and video services and, increasingly, mobile services too.
Other services experiencing high levels
of pricing & bundling innovation include rich-media conferencing,
which provides both subscription- and usage-based pricing models,
in-flight entertainment, outsourced call centers, videophones
and machine-to-machine (M2M) services.
Pricing & bundling innovations are
placing significant stress on existing operational infrastructure. Ordering
and billing systems, which were designed for relatively stable
and bounded services, are now acting as gating factors on “front-office” innovation. IT
organizations are rapidly moving toward service-oriented architectures
that enable service delivery platforms (SDPs) that facilitate
product development and launch. Pricing is increasingly
positioned as a centralized resource within this architecture,
consumable by any application or device.
“We applaud Highdeal for bringing attention
to both the opportunities and the challenges associated with
service pricing and bundling,” said Paul Hughes, Director of
Billing and Payment Strategies, Yankee Group. “As exciting
new applications and services come to market at an ever increasing
pace, service providers need systems that enable them to seek
out pricing models that resonate with their customers.”
“With emerging services such as mobile
PTT and broadband triple play, pricing is often the single most
challenging issue,” said Camilla Dahlen, President of Highdeal,
Inc. “We are delighted to share our findings with the
service provider community and look forward to the 2005 edition
of the Challenge.”
The 2004 Highdeal Challenge grand prize
winner has been announced and will enjoy a luxury vacation for
two to Paris in the springtime. For more information about
the Highdeal Challenge, please contact Highdeal at 212.332.2144.
About Highdeal
Highdeal is the leading provider of
pricing, high performance rating and settlement solutions for broadband
and mobile applications and services. Highdeal enables companies
offering these services to create and implement successful pricing
strategies in dynamic market environments. With over 100 implementations
in more than 40 countries, companies around the world rely on Highdeal
for their pricing and rating needs. Highdeal has offices in New
York, Paris, London, Munich, Santiago & Sao Paulo. For more
information, please visit www.highdeal.com.
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