OSS Line

Ericordia/Telicsson - Ericsson Completes Purchase of Telcordia

Back in June, after several month of speculation, news broke that it was Ericsson that intended to buy Telcordia. That deal has now completed, just a few weeks later than expected.

Celebratory Ericsson-branded mugs all-round for the Telcordia team.

According to the press release, Telcordia was aquired for $1.15billion for annual revenues of $739m.

Telcordia now joins Ericsson's Business Unit Mulimedia.

Ericsson to buy Telcordia

As if to prove you should never listen to rumours (eh? Light Reading?), Ericsson has announced their plan to purchase Telcordia.

Priced at $1.2bn for the OSS big-hitter reported to be currently doing around $739m in revenues.

Much more exciting news than my assumption of an investment bank putting up the cash.

More details on the FT website.

Telcordia Dips Toe in Cloudy Waters of SaaS for OSS

Is this a precursor to wider deployment of OSS products in the Cloud?

“Telcordia, a global leader in [blah blah etc.], announced today the availability of the Telcordia eLab, a new service that provides integrator partners with cloud-based access to the company's Next Generation OSS portfolio…”

Finally , a serious, all be it small, step towards new deployment architectures and business models for Big OSS. Telcordia’s ‘Next Generation’ software (Granite and Network Engineer) is now easily turn-on-and-off-able for those short term projects that you don’t want to be buying expensive hardware for.

Today, Telcordia eLab is only used for training, demo and testing purposes. But, presumably, there is no reason that, if this is successful, Telcordia couldn’t extend this service to commercial use of the OSS products. Training and testing is the natural first choice though.

And very clever of Telcordia to go for those low-hanging fruit first: It allows them to deliver their training services far quicker, with control over the installation, while reducing the overall total-cost of the activity.

How big is the jump to a full useable installation in the Cloud? Pretty big actually. With this first step Telcordia have technically proven their applications work in a virtual-machine based Cloud environment. But that does not necessarily include the large stack of admin, security and billing infrastructure that is required for a true SaaS offering in the cloud. More significant though, is the step their customers would have to take: Accepting that there are cost-of-ownership benefits to non-perpetual licenses and off-site deployments of business critical software. A leap of faith few telcos have made in the past.

Telcordia up for Sale

Telcordia has put up the for-sale sign, with a private sale looking more likely than an IPO. Telcordia’s current owners, private equity firms Providence Equity Partners and Warburg Pincus, have hired an investment bank to find a buyer.

News from The Wall Street Journal, republished in the telco press suggests a value of $1bn to $1.5bn, with possible industry acquirers being Amdocs, HP or Oracle. Less exciting, but more probable, is a sale to some other private equity firm.

Never mind that. How about some wild speculation? What would our industry do with Telcordia?

Amdocs. Significant product overlap in the inventory and fulfilment portfolio. It would be something to observe historic rival OSS suites Cramer and Granite going through a product merger. Amdocs lack anything to compare with Telcordia Network Engineer or Telcordia’s regulatory focused solutions, both of which would flesh-out their telco software offering.

UPDATE: Globes, the Israeil business site, ran with this scenario. Amdocs' biggest aquisition to date being Solect in 2000 for $1bn. Could they really drop another billion on Telcordia?

HP. Would probably love to access Telcordia’s regulatory offerings, like number portability, which often involve significant consultancy opportunities.

Oracle. Already have several million inventory solutions from Metasolv acquisition and subsequent new-builds. Adding a couple more wouldn’t make a dent. Like Amdocs, Telcordia’s Network Engineer would be a clear benefit, but regulatory and transformation solutions, with associated databases and middleware sales, would be attractive to Oracle. The strong domain expertise in Telcordia could help Oracle better compete with Amdocs.

We can only hope something so exciting will happen, rather than a dull deal between men in grey suits. I salivate at the prospect of an Amdocs-Telcordia mega-OSS-vendor. Is that wrong?

Management World 2010 Q&A - Telcordia

More views on TMW from the people investing in being there. What’s bon? What’s mal? We go there every year – pourquoi?

Robert Curran, Operations Solutions Marketing, at Telcordia looks forward to a packed show...

Telcordia has been around a long time. In fact, the company celebrated its 25th birthday last year. What is Telcordia all about today?

Telcordia enables Communications Service Providers (CSPs), enterprises, suppliers and government entities to successfully deploy innovative and advanced services that help our clients realize operational efficiencies, drive revenue, and maintain a competitive edge in the new era of services-dominated communications. Telcordia has globally trusted expertise in software and services to meet the needs of customers and partners, including, consulting, next-generation OSS, network and application interconnection, service delivery and charging  solutions, industry research and new technology development.

Is TMW Nice still considered the major OSS show of the year for you?

Yes. It has the most international audience compared to other tradeshows, and has not been overshadowed by billing vendors or topics.

TMW is a great event to judge the mood and the themes in the industry, and also to understand the OSS community's own evolving structure. This year we hope to determine what the major OSS-related priorities are, how they are expressed, and how their value is referenced.

Do you expect show attendance to be up or down this year?

Up. This industry can't stand still for long.

And for all those attendees, ash and British Airways strikes permitting, what should they expect to see from Telcordia next week?

TMW 2010 will see Telcordia talking about the ways in which we're able to help providers in wireless, broadband, enterprise and wholesale services realize the potential of their market opportunities, and of their investments in network and systems. We will have a couple of very interesting and timely new solutions on show, for wireless and fixed-line networks.

And catalyst projects in the Forumville?

Yes, the COMPASS catalyst project with T-Com Croatia. It's about using a service catalog driven approach to fulfillment. Telcordia has provided the core catalog component used within the end-to-end fulfillment process.

Finally, what one feature of Nice should first-time visitors not miss?

The bathrooms at the Negresco (act like you're staying there).

Right! See you all there! ROFL.

If you want to hook up with Telcordia at the show contact Sharon Oddy or simply visit them at booth #40 on the Expo floor. More about Telcordia at Management World 2010 here.

Automating Telcordia Granite with SASI

I found this LightReading article a few days ago, about a product that enables better automation of tasks that are usually GUI-driven in Granite.

Sincera, a Granite ‘boutique’ system integrator, has shipped their SASI (Simple Automated Service Interface) product to Time Warner Cable. The PR extols the virtues of using the Granite APIs rather than hacking the database directly. Well, yeah. It doesn’t go in to much detail beyond saying it reduces time and effort for data entry and data change tasks.

My assumption is that this is a type of ‘macro’ functionality. OSS vendor all have their own technical automation, and sometimes business (BPEL-style) workflow, but tend to lack user automation tasks. For example, if I wanted to find, check and rename a field in all my customer edge router records, I either do a lot of manual changes or I have to write a fairly inflexible piece of automation code. The platform to enable automation can also be quite expensive.

Sincera have spotted that its relatively easy to query the database of an OSS inventory, apply a bit of logic, then fire off API calls to make bulk changes. It’s A Good Thing, and I bet it wasn’t more than a couple of man-months of development on their part.

The risk with This Sort of Thing is that you over-empower the user. A simple front end that allows users to quickly find and modify many thousands of objects in the inventory can lead to some big mistakes being made. Does SASI or Granite have enough checks to limit run-away edits, or set the scope of a user modification? Hope so.

‘Undo’ in a large-scale, multi-user environment is not an easy thing to get right.

Concerns aside, I like this. OSS automation has not seen much development lately, other than in service catalog solutions. This addresses a basic requirement. Furthermore, its great to see third-parties releasing productized add-ons.

Telcordia at 25

Being part of something from the start is a great experience, one I was lucky enough to have with Cramer Systems. Early in Cramer's life Telcordia were the incumbent competition. While a lot of the good stuff about joining a start-up is the friendship, varied work and transparency of the organisation, there's also a feeling that you're doing something new, something better than the big incumbent.

I was pleased to see in an article at Billing & OSS World that while Cramer were enjoying trying to stick it to Telcordia (and their acquisition, Granite), Telcordia were enjoying sticking it to everyone else too. The article gets a bit PR-ish at times, but even so, I'd love to believe that after 25 years Telcordia is still a company populated by early-joiners, still innovating, and still enjoying it.