Amdocs to acquire Bridgewater Systems in €150m transaction
David Sharpley, senior vice president of marketing and product management of Bridgewater Systems
Amdocs has entered into an agreement to acquire Bridgewater Systems for C$8.20 (€5.8) per share, valuing the Toronto-headquartered policy management specialist at C$211m (€149.5m). Amdocs expects Bridgewater to further expand its portfolio of Customer Experience Systems with its data experience management capabilities.
David Sharpley, senior vice president of marketing and product management of Bridgewater Systems (pictured), told VanillaPlus he expects Bridgewater to become a separate, independent, standalone business unit within Amdocs. Commenting on the potential deal, he said: “Strategically on the part of Amdocs it’s very wise to bring policy and subscriber data management into their portfolio. Clearly, our policy leadership was the attraction.”
“From the Bridgewater Systems perspective, we continue to grow and invest and scale [up] our business,” he added, “but to get to Amdocs’ scale would take a broad set of customers and a huge amount of people.”
Brian Shepherd, group president of Amdocs, commented: “This acquisition would build on Amdocs’ leadership in delivering innovative solutions that change market paradigms. It is a continuation of our strategy to support service providers as they seek to transform their businesses in anticipation of new market opportunities like 4G and machine-to-machine, and in response to clear threats, such as the data explosion.”
Sharpley added that the agreement signals the extent to which policy management has become a critical strategic enabler for CSPs. “It validates the strategic role policy and subscriber data management play,” he said. “By closely coupling the network and the IT sides, policy plays a critical role in the evolution of the customer experience. It is such a robust part of the market. In the last two to five years you have seen one of the most rapid maturations with a lot of activity and RFPs.”
Tech Mahindra and Redknee have formed a partnership to jointly deliver software and services to the communications service providers market. The companies announced the deal at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2011, reflecting Redknee’s successful integration of its real-time billing capabilities with Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
Larry Goldman, head of Telecoms Software Research at analyst firm Analysys Mason, commented: “Communications service providers increasingly value fully integrated software solutions. This agreement provides a broad range of integrated billing, charging, customer care and OSS capabilities that deliver improved time to market and reduced cost.”
Jim Dietrich, managing director, Worldwide Telecommunications at Microsoft added: “We are excited by this announcement by Redknee and Tech Mahindra. As a matter of practice, we actively encourage Microsoft partners to collaborate to ensure the strongest depth of expertise and breadth of solutions are delivered to our customers. The reputation and capabilities of Redknee and Tech Mahindra in the telecommunications industry make this agreement a shining example of how our partner ecosystem enables synergies and creates mutual value for our partners and our customers.”
Tech Mahindra will integrate Redknee’s Turnkey Converged Billing and Customer Care solution, which is based on Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2, and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2, into its existing portfolio of OSS/BSS solutions. By pre-integrating Redknee’s solutions into its offering, Tech Mahindra can deliver extended BSS capabilities with a faster deployment speed for service providers. The partnership will also immediately widen the scope of business opportunities that Redknee can address among service providers, through the additional range of services delivered through Tech Mahindra.
“We are very excited to partner with Tech Mahindra to deliver our next generation converged billing platform to more customers around the world,” said Lucas Skoczkowski, CEO of Redknee (pictured). “We see a growing opportunity to address requirements for real-time monetisation solutions for wireless, multi-service and cloud service providers across the world and we feel that our partner strategy is critical to fulfilling this opportunity.”
VOSS Solutions, a provider of unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) service delivery and management software, has announced the general availability of VOSS 7.4, a fulfillment management platform that overarches complex UC&C networks for managed service providers and large enterprises.
VOSS 7.4 now supports the latest release of Cisco’s UC applications, including Unified Communications Manager 8.6 and its advanced suite of voice and mobility features; Unity Connection 8.6 and its advanced suite of messaging features; Unified Presence 8.6; Cisco WebEx; and an extensive range Unified Mobility Clients and the latest Cisco devices, such as the Cisco CIUS.
Mike Frayne, CEO at VOSS Solutions (pictured), commented: “As UC&C becomes more widely adopted, fulfillment management is a necessity, rather than an option. Cisco has recognised this fact with its decision to embed VOSS within its new HCS architecture. VOSS 7.4 not only simplifies the delivery and management of UC&C services and applications through a centralised administration portal, it enables organisations to make radical operational savings at the same time.”
Comarch enhances BSS suite with loyalty management solution
Comarch has launched a new version of its Loyalty Management solution designed to enable the development of effective, unique loyalty programmes for residential, SOHO, SMEs and enterprise segments. The product directly supports various channels of communication such as email, SMS, PoS, call centre and customer portal. Thanks to modern rule-based mechanisms, advanced customer profile management features and a user-friendly drag and drop interface even the most complicated loyalty programme can be easily developed, ran and tracked by marketers and product managers.
Piotr Machnik, EVP Product Management & Marketing at Comarch’s Telecommunications Business Unit, said: “We are observing an increase in the saturation of the telecom market which drives CSPs to look for new methods of lowering customer retention costs and attracting customers attention to next generation telecommunication and content-based services. This is why we prepared a special offer for telecoms, based on our Comarch Loyalty Management suite, which has been on the retail market for over ten years now. Based on our experience in the BSS/CRM domain and cooperation with marketing departments of leading mobile and multi-service operators, we adjusted Comarch Loyalty Management to the requirements of the telecom market. We believe customer retention is one of the strongest strategic priorities for operators right now and therefore we meet their business needs with a dedicated loyalty software.”
Tekelec has successfully integrated its session, policy, performance and subscriber data management products into a new LTE solutions portfolio. The move follows a previously announced customer win with a tier-one North American service provider in which Tekelec integrated its Home Subscriber Server (HSS) address resolution database with its Diameter Signaling Router (DSR). This allows the service provider to scale LTE services by routing Diameter messages to the appropriate HSS in the network.
“LTE network build-outs present new challenges that require innovative solutions as operators add subscribers and network capacity to meet the exponential demand for mobile broadband services,” said Joe McGarvey, principal analyst at industry research firm Current Analysis. “Tekelec’s strategy is to replicate its 2G and 3G network successes in LTE by simplifying and streamlining complex network architectures to enable network scalability, flexibility and reliability.
“Ron de Lange, president and CEO at Tekelec, added: “As service providers evolve to LTE, they are discovering new revenue opportunities and architectural hurdles. Tekelec’s innovative, integrated LTE solutions are helping our customers scale their networks to deliver advanced, revenue-generating LTE services.”
Metaswitch speeds delivery of RCS-e solution for mobile operators
Following the acquisition of Colibria in April of this year, Metaswitch Networks has released an RCS-e 1.1 compliant Instant Messaging Server. Just weeks after RCS-e standards were finalised, Metaswitch completed product development and extended testing with its primary channel partners. This partner ecosystem continues to lead the industry in providing operators with flexible solutions that guarantee open integration and interoperability between network elements and handset applications.
The enhanced Rich Communications Suite is a strategic initiative supported by five leading European operators: Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telecom Italia, Telefónica and Vodafone. It delivers a simplified extension to voice and text, enabling subscribers to send instant messages, video chat and exchange files in real time. Led by the GSM Association, RCS-e will help mobile operators meet the growing demands of subscribers for advanced communications services and combat increased competition from Over-the-Top (OTT) competitors eroding minutes, revenue and subscriber mind share.
“Nokia Siemens Networks continues to enjoy an excellent relationship with Metaswitch Networks,” said Uwe Puetzschler, head of SDF Global at Nokia Siemens Networks. “Having the complete RCS-e feature set in our Munich Interoperability Testing environment makes it possible for us to proactively work with client vendors today. We are also able to demonstrate the benefits of RCS-e to leading-edge customers who are eager to prepare for an early launch of these new services.”
Paul Kemps, vice president of worldwide partner channels and rich communications at Metaswitch, added: “Metaswitch is committed to driving the Colibria product line as a front runner in the RCS space, and we are delighted to see continued support from the large network vendors for our products. With established support for interoperability testing with the world’s largest IMS vendors and handset suppliers, we can deliver on operators’ aggressive launch schedules with minimal risk.”
Subex has appointed Sanjeev Aga as an independent director on its board. Aga’s career has spanned 38 years encompassing sectors such as consumer, services, entertainment, light engineering and telecommunications. He is the former managing director of Idea Cellular.
Commenting on his appointment, Aga said, “Subex, over recent years, has marked itself out as a company to watch. With its unique suite of product and service offerings, the coming years hold even bigger promise for Subex. It is my privilege to associate with Subex and its team”.
Aga is an Honours graduate in Physics from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi and a post graduate from the Indian Institute of Management, Kolkata (1973). He is based in Mumbai, and now engages in advisory and consultant roles for corporates and not-for-profit organisations.
MetraTech has appointed Larry Dennison chief architecture officer. Dennison will take responsibility for both product management and software architecture in his new role. He brings expertise in distributed systems, networking and OSS as he developed and deployed products in some of the largest and most demanding customer networks in the world. As a division scientist at internet and parallel computing systems pioneer BBN Technologies, Dennison began building massively parallel distributed systems including the BBN Butterfly parallel computer. After BBN, he co-founded Avici Systems as chief architect and CTO to tackle the challenges of scalable core routing using distributed architecture designs based on his PhD thesis from MIT.
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