Unisys Builds ROI Tool to Help Carriers See Subscriber Service Revenue

BLUE BELL, PA - Unisys Corporation (NYSE: UIS) has developed a planning tool that helps network service providers (NSPs) measure the potential financial impact of offering voice services such as voice portal and speech solutions to their subscribers. Unisys developed the tool in recognition that communications companies rigorously justify today's investments based on whether they can create timely and sizable financial returns for the NSP shareholders. Voice solutions such as voice-activated dialing and voice-controlled Web browsers have the potential to improve a carrier's average revenue per user (ARPU) dramatically through subscriptions, billable transactions and increased network usage. "Unisys key focus is to provide solutions and services that help our communications clients re-ignite revenue growth," said Larry Srader, vice president, Strategy and Marketing, Global Communications Industry, Unisys. "Voice and speech technologies in particular have a great potential for driving revenue and profitability, so it's important for us to have a tool that helps model this potential for our clients." Unisys uses its voice services ROI tool with clients to help build a financial scenario that estimates the revenues, costs and expenses that NSPs may generate by launching voice services in their respective markets. The tool was designed with hundreds of possible configurations for multiple voice services and Unisys retail pricing was applied to each configuration. Users of the tool may enter their own assumptions or, if they prefer, they may use Unisys default assumptions. These assumptions are based on end-user demand, pricing, and service usage characteristics that Unisys has developed from its experience with early adopters in this market. By combining actual client assumptions on demand and pricing with Unisys pricing for hardware, software and services, telecommunications clients get an indication of new service profitability and whether or not opportunity exists to create financial value via voice services offerings to their subscribers. More specifically, inputting revenue, direct costs, capital expenditure, and depreciation forecasts altogether will generate a five-year financial forecast from the network service provider's perspective. The first release of the ROI tool enables modeling for voice-activated dialing, call center auto-attendant, speech-controlled messaging, and voice access to Web content. Later releases are planned to include enhanced capabilities to model other forms of voice-controlled messaging. The tool also features details such as geography, descriptive statistics such as calls-per-day, and required ports. The development of this tool involved a joint effort of Unisys Market Source communications marketing consultancy and solutions development teams.