Kognitio, a leading provider of solutions to business problems that require acquisition, rationalisation and analysis of both large and complex data volumes, has announced Pricing Applianceâ„¢, a sophisticated rules-based pricing engine that allows organisations to rapidly load, explore and analyse data and run complex, financial computations, before generating spreadsheet-like rules to identify pricing anomalies and missed revenue opportunities.

Powered by Kognitio’s WX2 analytical database and RateIntegration’s PriceMaker™ Enterprise Pricing Server, Pricing Appliance is a proven, robust, and scalable modelling appliance that is ideal for activities such as tariff, pricing and cost modelling, revenue & cost audit and compliance and cost and profitability analytics The solution allows tariff-based businesses to become more competitive in today’s market where industry consolidation, technological developments and de-regulation have lead to lower prices and thin margins. Available now for telecom operators, future versions of Pricing Appliance will be targeted at Retail, Utilities, Transport, VOIP and other tariff-based clients.

‘Although businesses such as telecom operators have high-level visibility into revenues, costs and margins, they have a very restricted view at more granular levels of re-pricing or cost-verifying all events within a specific geography, customer segment, calling pattern or time-period . There has never been a more urgent need for more effective revenue management,’ said Roger Llewellyn, CEO, at Kognitio. ‘Highly detailed event-level profitability analysis can lead to significantly higher revenues and thanks to Pricing Appliance organisations can now overcome the technical challenges that until today prevented such intelligence to be gathered.’

Different from similar offerings, Pricing Appliance is the only solution that provides both high-scale data processing and high usability. Other key features of Pricing Appliance include:

- business users can run analysis of pricing algorithms themselves using current and past data to create data models and analyse queries;

- both historical and current data can be analysed, separately for comparison or as a single data set;

- the business rules used in pricing and revenue analytics are visible to all the diverse stakeholders in the organisation — driving out any misunderstandings between the network, IT, and business-level groups that collectively develop the nuances of revenue and costs;
running and support costs are kept low as Pricing Appliance runs on commodity hardware;
as more data is loaded for analysis and computation the performance of the appliance remains constant through the simple addition of more units of commodity hardware.

‘Pricing Appliance enables intuitive expression of any set of rules for pricing and costing including complex discount schemes, loyalty programs or promotions with cumulative balances or entirely new business models for converged services” said Thomas Thekkethala, CEO at RateIntegration. ‘We are very excited about bringing the Pricing Appliance to the market and are confident that it will be well received by customers world-wide”

‘Pricing Appliance is an attractive proposition because for the first time end users can benefit from the combination of the latest data management and storage technologies and rules-based pricing,’ said analyst x, at analyst house y. ‘Any solution that offers telecom operators the possibility to increase revenues, learn more about their customers and become more competitive is bound to generate significant demand in today’s industry climate.’

Pricing Appliance’s extensive flexibility allows data and events to be processed in line with the business demands. The solution uses the customer data “as is” by loading it from the organisation’s event data warehouse using industry-standard ETL tools; the events are then stored in a standard form in the appliance along with other data such as accounts, customers and demographics. By putting the data in one place on the appliance, users also benefit from the flexibility and scalability of the system. In addition, because dynamic analysis demands a dynamic reporting capability, analysis and reporting can be delivered using industry standard tools such as MS Office, Business Objects, Cognos and MicroStrategy. Alternatively the reports can be served via a web portal to enable multiple users within an organisation to obtain analysis results quickly and remotely.

Availability
Pricing Appliance is available now is also available through a ‘try before you buy’ promotion. The solution can be deployed as part of an ASP provision, an in-house solution or part of an outsourced contract. Later in 2007 Pricing Appliance will also be available through a number of Kognitio’s partners.

About Kognitio
Kognitio is an innovative, technology-rich company, providing leading-edge solutions to business problems that require the acquisition, rationalisation and analysis of large or complex data. Kognitio’s offering is centred around three areas: WX2, the fastest and most scalable analytical database on the market, managed services and data migration expertise. All three areas are complemented by an extensive professional services team helping to ensure businesses gain competitive advantage from their data. With its industry-leading analytical database offering, WX2, Kognitio is able to turn a company’s raw data into valuable business insight fast, empowering its customers to realise comprehensive answers to critical business questions. Kognitio’s managed services model allows its customers to focus on running their businesses and increasing the bottom line. By also adopting Kognitio’s outsourced approach, customers are able to reduce start-up time and costs, as well as avoid expensive product acquisition costs. With a strong specialisation in the insurance (life and pensions) as well as financial services, Kognitio’s data migration services help companies to provide lower risk and lower cost solutions to companies that are rationalising and consolidating operational platforms. Kognitio has the largest independent migration services team in the UK. Headquartered in Marlow, UK, Kognitio delivers competitive advantage to its clients in various industries, including telecommunications (BT, ntl:), the financial sector (Marks and Spencer Money, Norwich Union, Prudential) and utilities (Scottish Power). For more information, visit the Kognitio website at www.kognitio.com.

About RateIntegration
RateIntegration is the leading provider of Revenue Lifecycle Management (RLM) software and solutions to model, bill, assure and analyze pre and post-paid converged services revenues and profits in telecom, media and entertainment. The Company’s Tier I customers process over $15 billion in annual revenues while achieving the fastest time to revenue and profitability at the lowest total cost of ownership in the industry. The PriceMaker™ Enterprise Pricing Server, widely regarded as the industry’s technology leader, enables global service providers, software companies and managed service providers accelerate the modeling and billing of new and existing services as well as the revenue and cost assurance and analytics across the revenue life-cycle. To start down the path of accelerating your time to revenue and profitability today, visit RateIntegration’s web site at www.rateintegration.com or contact us directly at +1 919-484-2442 x103 to schedule a comprehensive demonstration of our PriceMaker Enterprise Pricing Server and Revenue Lifecycle Management solutions.