IDC MarketScape
IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Enterprise-Focused Subscription and Usage Management Applications
2025–2026 Vendor Assessment
Tiffany McCormick
THIS EXCERPT FEATURES CSG AS A MAJOR PLAYER
ABOUT THIS EXCERPT
The content for this excerpt was taken directly from IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Enterprise-Focused Subscription and Usage Management Applications 2025–2026 Vendor Assessment (Doc # US53278225).
THE IDC MARKETSCAPE VENDOR ANALYSIS MODEL
IDC MarketScape vendor analysis model is designed to provide an overview of the competitive fitness of vendors/suppliers in a given market.
The IDC MarketScape model utilizes a rigorous scoring methodology based on both qualitative and quantitative criteria that results in a single evaluation of each vendor’s position within a given market.
This model provides a clear framework in which the product and service offerings, capabilities and strategies, and current and future market success factors of IT and telecommunications vendors can be meaningfully compared.
IDC MARKETSCAPE VENDOR POSITIONS:
A vendor's position in the IDC MarketScape will fall into one of the following categories:
• Leaders are vendors strong in all areas of both strategy and capabilities.
• Major Players show strength in most areas of strategy and capabilities.
• Contenders have strengths, but often are limited in some areas such as geography or specific product features.
• Participants are often new entrants or fading stars with few exceptional capabilities or strategies.
Please see the Appendix for detailed methodology, market definition, and scoring criteria.
IDC OPINION
Enterprise buyers in the subscription and usage management (S&UM) software market are more sophisticated than ever, demanding robust platforms capable of addressing industry-specific requirements at a global scale. While billing and invoicing remain table stakes, large enterprises now demand deeper orchestration: integrated product catalogs, event-driven workflows, predictive churn analytics, and multientity revenue recognition, which span complex global structures. As businesses look for scalable platforms to monetize a mix of digital products, services, and hybrid offerings, they are demanding solutions that go well beyond basic billing, emphasizing the ability to orchestrate the entire revenue life cycle from offer creation to revenue recognition, partner settlement, and customer retention.
Customer feedback and vendor disclosures indicate that modernization has become both a competitive necessity and a foundation for agility. Buyers from enterprises of all sizes are seeking platforms with high levels of automation, intelligent integrations, and flexible architectures to rapidly bill for new pricing and packaging strategies. Vendors are responding by investing in AI-driven product development, improved onboarding experiences, and robust industry accelerators to deliver business value faster and on a global scale. Customer priorities have shifted toward platforms that seamlessly scale across geographies and business models, handle high billing volumes, and support advanced use cases, such as usage-based charging, hybrid consumption models, and multientity rollouts. The most successful vendors distinguish themselves by their ability to serve complex enterprises, offering deep vertical capabilities, strong CRM/ERP/payment integrations, and continuous innovation.
Customer interviews confirm that vendor satisfaction depends on factors such as time to market for new products (especially those involving consumption-based models), end-to-end capabilities from subscription management to revenue recognition, and the flexibility to support evolving pricing, packaging, and integration needs. Customers consistently highlight vendor responsiveness and innovation, particularly those platforms leveraging AI for predictive analytics and dynamic pricing, as key differentiators.
From the vendor perspective, this market is more dynamic and competitive than ever. Leading providers are leveraging their global partner networks, expanding industryspecific feature sets, and accelerating the rollout of AI-powered decisioning and analytics. The integration of advanced mediation engines, unified order-to-cash workflows, modular extensibility, and self-service analytics is now table stakes. Many vendors are also prioritizing rapid data integration with enterprise data lakes, native support for prepaid credit models, and advanced workflow automation, all while ensuring compliance, security, and regional regulatory alignment.
Key findings include:
▪ Accelerated monetization agility: Enterprises achieving the highest ROI emphasize time to market, integration flexibility, and scalability as the top outcomes of platform modernization.
▪ Automation as a differentiator: Surveyed users identified AI-enabled automation, self-service analytics, and compliant multientity billing as the capabilities that most improve productivity and accuracy.
▪ Customer experience driving retention: Buyers cite seamless onboarding, proactive vendor engagement, and ongoing product innovation as key factors sustaining long-term satisfaction.
▪ The importance of global readiness: Platforms delivering consistent performance, localization, and tax compliance across regions provide the foundation for monetization at an enterprise scale.
▪ Intelligence at the core: The next evolution of subscription and usage management is intelligent orchestration. Platforms embedding AI into billing, revenue recognition, and customer life-cycle workflows are turning monetization data into continuous operational insight, driving accuracy, speed, and scalability across global recurring revenue models.
IDC MARKETSCAPE VENDOR INCLUSION CRITERIA
The vendor list for this evaluation consists of enterprise-focused subscription and usage management vendors that meet these criteria:
▪ The vendors in this group are mostly focused on companies with over 1,000 employees, which typically have complex offers, pricing, and billing and revenue recognition needs; need higher performance; integrate with enterprise applications; and expect high performance from customer success and support.
▪ The vendor has an active customer base and is regularly cited by peers as appearing in competitive deals.
▪ The vendor meets IDC's definition for a subscription and usage management application in terms of the functionality it supports (see the Market Definition section).
ADVICE FOR TECHNOLOGY BUYERS
Enterprises evaluating S&UM platforms should approach the decision as a strategic investment in their current and future monetization infrastructure, not simply a billing system upgrade. Customer interviews and IDC's 2025 SaaS Path Survey data (n = 2,877) indicate that time to value, automation depth, and integration flexibility are the strongest predictors of success. Buyers should begin by mapping how recurring revenue models intersect with existing ERP, CRM, and finance systems and ensure that selected platforms can orchestrate the full life cycle, from offer creation and entitlement through billing, revenue recognition, and renewal. They should prioritize vendors that demonstrate proven enterprise scale, robust global compliance support, and mature partner ecosystems capable of accelerating implementation across multiple business units and regions.
Buyers should focus on automation and intelligence. As recurring revenue operations grow more complex, manual processes quickly constrain scalability and introduce risk. IDC's 2025 SaaSPath Survey data also shows that data integration challenges, limited automation, and the lack of real-time usage visibility remain the most common pain points for enterprise users. Therefore, buyers should emphasize:
▪ End-to-end automation: Seek platforms that embed AI into operational workflows such as anomaly detection, entitlement validation, and usage forecasting.
▪ Integration readiness: Evaluate vendors' ability to interoperate with CRM, ERP, and payment ecosystems through APIs and mediation layers, ensuring data consistency and auditability.
▪ Intelligent analytics: Favor solutions that extend monetization data into enterprise data lakes or BI environments to provide unified visibility and support data-driven financial decisions.
Enterprises leveraging AI-driven automation and self-service analytics achieve faster revenue realization, reduced billing errors, and improved compliance. The most successful organizations adopt S&UM platforms that scale across products, entities, and geographies while maintaining data integrity and compliance. They evaluate vendors for flexibility in supporting multiple monetization models (tokenization, consumption, hybrid, etc.) and for their ability to adapt quickly to emerging models. Survey responses from IDC's SaaSPath Survey show that usage tracking, revenue analytics, and consumption-based billing enablement are the top areas of planned
investment. Technology buyers should ensure that platforms provide event-driven architecture and AI-enhanced usage validation to enable accurate, granular billing and forecasting.
For buyers evaluating switching between enterprise vendors, customer feedback indicates that dissatisfaction with existing S&UM systems often stems from integration rigidity, limited automation, or slow time to market for new products, rather than deficiencies in billing accuracy. Before switching, buyers should conduct a cost-benefit analysis that quantifies expected efficiency gains and automation improvements against potential transition costs. They should focus on identifying where the current system constrains growth; for example, limited AI capabilities, manual revenue recognition, or an inability to support advanced hybrid or consumption models.
When transitioning between vendors, data migration, change management, and operational continuity must be top priorities. IDC recommends buyers:
▪ Evaluate each vendor's migration methodology, API openness, and tooling for data conversion and validation to minimize disruption to active billing cycles.
▪ Select vendors offering structured migration frameworks, sandbox environments for parallel testing, and co-delivery models that maintain compliance and audit readiness throughout deployment.
▪ Assess the vendor's customer success maturity, including onboarding, enablement, and post-launch support, because these drive ROI realization and user adoption.
Highly developed organizations are embedding AI to monitor usage data pipelines, detect anomalies, and correct issues before billing cycles close. Buyers should evaluate how each platform operationalizes intelligence in these areas; for example, using automation to reconcile discrepancies, align consumption data with entitlements, and ensure financial accuracy.
Finally, buyers should treat vendor engagement as a long-term partnership. IDC's enterprise customer feedback on vendors consistently rated satisfaction highest when vendors offered road map transparency, proactive account management, and continuous innovation. The platforms that deliver intelligence at the core, blending automation, analytics, and extensibility, will enable enterprises to move beyond operational efficiency toward true monetization agility, revenue assurance, and customer trust on a global scale.
VENDOR SUMMARY PROFILE
This section briefly explains IDC's key observations resulting in a vendor's position in the IDC MarketScape. While every vendor is evaluated against each of the criteria
outlined in the Appendix, the description here provides a summary of each vendor's strengths and challenges.
CSG
After a thorough evaluation of CSG's strategies and capabilities, IDC has positioned the company in the Major Players category in the 2025–2026 IDC MarketScape for worldwide enterprise-focused subscription and usage management applications.
CSG, headquartered in Greenwood Village, Colorado, is a global provider of business support systems (BSSs), digital monetization, and customer engagement solutions. Founded over 40 years ago, the company has expanded its portfolio to include subscription management, convergent billing, mediation, revenue management, and customer journey orchestration. Its flagship monetization platform, CSG Ascendon, supports subscription and usage-based business models across telecom and media. In 2024, CSG made acquisitions to accelerate its diversification strategy, including MassPrinting to expand further into the banking, financial services, and insurance sectors and iCG Pay, a high-growth North American ACH and credit card payment processing company.
CSG serves more than 900 clients across 120+ countries, processing over $100 billion in annual payments, supporting 900 million wireless subscribers, and handling more than 500 million daily charging transactions. With a workforce of over 5,700 employees, CSG continues to expand its footprint in emerging markets, including the Nordics, the Middle East, and Africa.
Key attributes of the company are as follows:
▪ Application type: Cloud-native SaaS (multitenant, public cloud)
▪ Top industries served: Telecommunications and media and entertainment
▪ Global presence: Operations in 120+ countries; regional offices across North America, EMEA, LATAM, and APAC
▪ Prebuilt integrations: 1,000+ open APIs, with prebuilt connectors for CPQ, ERP, CRM, payment gateways, and digital marketplaces
▪ Cloud infrastructure used: Multitenant SaaS delivery hosted on AWS
Strengths
▪ CSG Ascendon provides robust subscription life-cycle management, including onboarding, renewals, amendments, upgrades, downgrades, and cancellations. The platform automates billing schedules and proration and handles complex scenarios, such as asset merges, splits, and billing frequency changes. Integrated
with CRM and finance systems, it offers user-friendly interfaces and reporting capabilities that support compliance, renewals, and revenue accuracy.
▪ The solution supports a diverse range of billing models, including subscription, usage, prepaid, postpaid, hybrid, milestone, and evergreen models. Billing records are generated automatically upon order activation, with full support for advance and arrears billing, daily micropayments, and proration for partial periods. These features are particularly valuable for high-volume, consumerfacing services, such as telecom and media.
▪ Ascendon's flexible amendment capabilities allow changes to product configuration, quantities, bundles, and billing parameters midcontract. Real-time rating and charging, policy control, and provisioning of services set Ascendon apart from lightweight subscription billers because it supports large-scale transactional volumes, ensuring billing accuracy. Every amendment automatically updates schedules, contract values, and audit trails, supporting ASC606/IFRS15 compliance and revenue assurance.
Challenges
▪ CSG Ascendon is optimized for telecom and media and is expanding into adjacent industries, such as retail, utilities, and financial services. However, brand recognition and adoption outside its core verticals remain limited, creating a steeper learning curve for enterprises in nontelecom sectors and requiring more upfront enablement.
▪ Although API-driven, integration with legacy BSS/OSS environments can be complex for tier 1 operators with fragmented architectures. While Ascendon's modularity allows deployment to be done in phases with proven in-house migration expertise from CSG, customers often need careful planning and extended consulting support to deploy the full solution, which can increase implementation timelines.
▪ Although Ascendon offers several APIs and cloud-native capabilities, feedback indicates that developer enablement and self-service tooling could be stronger. The amount of documentation, sandbox environments, and training resources increases reliance on professional services. This, combined with the platform's enterprise-grade cost and complexity, makes Ascendon less accessible for businesses seeking lighter-weight or lower-cost subscription management solutions.
Consider CSG When
Consider CSG if you are an enterprise service provider or large subscription-driven business that requires high-volume, real-time rating and billing with cloud-native scalability. Ascendon is especially strong for organizations in telecom, media, and
adjacent industries that need flexible monetization models, churn-reduction capabilities, and deep integration with broader BSS and OSS ecosystems.
APPENDIX
IDC MarketScape Methodology
IDC MarketScape criteria selection, weightings, and vendor scores represent wellresearched IDC judgment about the market and specific vendors. IDC analysts tailor the range of standard characteristics by which vendors are measured through structured discussions, surveys, and interviews with market leaders, participants, and end users. Market weightings are based on user interviews, buyer surveys, and the input of IDC experts in each market. IDC analysts base individual vendor scores, and ultimately vendor positions on the IDC MarketScape, on detailed surveys and interviews with the vendors, publicly available information, and end-user experiences in an effort to provide an accurate and consistent assessment of each vendor's characteristics, behavior, and capability.
Market Definition
Subscription and usage management applications are software platforms that efficiently monetize recurring business and pricing models. These applications allow the creation and management of an offer, which is often the performance obligations of a contract and includes the products/services sold, pricing model, timing, usage, and entitlement/provisioning. The pricing model can be one-time, subscription, outcome, consumption, or a combination of models. The offer can be sold over any channel.
The application serves as the central point for offer creation and amendments, billing, rating, invoicing, basic entitlements, payments, collections, analytics, and revenue management to calculate the correct amount of revenue to recognize based on the value delivered to the customer. Increasingly, these applications are taking on additional roles, including life-cycle pricing (promotional pricing), recommending upselling/cross-selling, data mediation (aggregate usage data), partner settlement, CPQ, and providing deep integration with CRM and ecommerce packages. IDC segments the subscription and usage management application marketplace into two market segments:
▪ Enterprise (the focus of this IDC MarketScape): The vendor is targeting the application to an enterprise-sized customer (typically more than 1,000 employees). For example, the use case is more complex (high performance, complex contracts, channels, pricing), and the application integrates with many enterprise-class business systems and has strong revenue recognition capabilities. Customers
expect high service levels from vendors at this level; therefore, customer success and support must exhibit high performance and be more personal.
▪ SME: The vendor is targeting the application to a small or medium-sized company (typically fewer than 1,000 employees) but also likely has enterprisesized companies that are using the application to monetize a recurring service within a business unit. The application should be easy to implement and use and have strong customer retention capabilities (payment retry, dunning, promotions, etc.).
LEARN MORE
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Synopsis
The IDC study provides a comprehensive evaluation of well-established platforms enabling enterprises to monetize recurring, usage-based, and hybrid business models at a global scale. As enterprise buyers demand deeper orchestration, automation, and intelligence beyond basic billing, vendors are responding with AI-driven product innovation, robust integrations, and flexible architectures to support complex revenue life cycles. The report highlights that modernization, automation, and global readiness are now essential for agility and competitive differentiation, with customer satisfaction hinging on time to market, end-to-end capabilities, and vendor responsiveness. The assessment advises technology buyers to prioritize platforms with embedded AI, seamless integration, and flexible monetization models, emphasizing strategic investment in infrastructure that supports evolving pricing, packaging, and compliance needs. The report concludes that intelligent orchestration and automation are driving the next evolution in subscription and usage management, enabling enterprises to achieve monetization agility, operational efficiency, and sustained customer trust.
"In the race to monetize digital and hybrid offerings, enterprises must look beyond basic billing. Intelligent orchestration, automation, and AI-driven insights are now the foundation for global revenue agility. The future belongs to platforms that turn operational data into strategic advantage." Tiffany McCormick, research director, AI Monetization, Pricing Strategies, and Business Models at IDC