It was merely a matter of time before the ripple effects of the credit crunch started to negatively impact some of the “privatization”/buy-out deals of telecommunications companies.  Bell Canada’s parent, BCE, is now experiencing issues with their buy-out.  Melinda Peer has details in her report on how BCE and KPMG disagree on how the deal is currently structured.

Personally I find it interesting that many of these deals (like those at Chrysler, etc) are finding the accountants and the financiers now getting cold feet.  I understand the “whys”, but I still find it interesting that the pendulum has swung so far back to a concept of “risk avoidance” at all costs after an almost reckless period of time relating to anything goes “risk tolerance”.

These “privatization” deals represent a significant opportunity to break from the drivers of Wall Street to rebuild telecom business models based on the future rather than the next quarter. 

The happy medium for both the telecom deals and the overall finance market is to actually look at the risks and understand the tolerance correctly.  Hopefully (knock on wood), the global finance markets return to a certain amount of “sanity” in early 2009 to complete some of these “privatization” deals

Here is a question for you:

What’s the difference between Route Optimization and Theft?

The answer depends on your perspective.

If you are the CFO of the company with the cost associated with the call, lowering your outlay is a prudent financial move.  If you are the CFO of the company who derived revenues from a call and/or the government official who derives taxes from a long distance call, route optimization is theft from your organization.

Now there is a company that is promoting the ability to turn all calls into local calls or the ultimate route optimization….  I believe that there will be a significant amount of “teeth gnashing” over this concept at US-based carriers.  I also believe that international organizations who don’t have the same “net neutrality” issues will look into the blocking of such call/Internet traffic, if they can; and the legality of such equipment and practices, if they can’t. 

I don’t like Tim McElligott’s wit and opinion…. I LOVE Tim’s wit and opinion. Here’s his latest compare and contrast between the telecom and auto industries.

In particular, I liked one of his final points:

“they [service providers] had better know their customer well. That means they better start learning about them today. Better to know your customer than to have to get to know your Congressman.”

I do not so much agree with McElligott’s concept in terms of looking for government bail-outs, but in the concept that service providers need to be mindful of their potential new business models.

Protection of customer data and privacy will probably be the agenda of the “new look” FCC under the Obama administration and not how you can make revenues off of the customer.

In the telecommunications industry, the concept of Revenue Assurance started with accounting for revenues. This was fine in the era of homogeneous networks and "internal products" like landline and walled garden / on-deck content. However, in the era of heterogeneous networks, content agreements and off-deck value add propositions; Revenue Assurance needs to grow to include more than just looking at revenues.

Here is a look at how Kathy Romano at Verizon is looking at Revenue Assurance and moving the state of the art forward to include more than just revenues.

Not really sure how or why I managed to come across the UNSPSC website, but I thought that people might be interested in some fun.  The UNSPSC website describes itself this way:

“The United Nations Standard Products and Services Code^® (UNSPSC^®) provides an open, global multi-sector standard for efficient, accurate classification of products and services.”

What it really is the home to a 16mb pdf file listing every conceivable product and service under the UN umbrella…. However, business intelligence and data warehousing seemed to be absent.  Nine different “back hoes” for earthmoving, but only “database” for technology.