Billing & OSS World

Mobile advertising is on the move

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Ty Wang, senior director of product marketing for service delivery solutions at Oracle, posted an entry on the Open Communication Blog at Billing & OSS World touting a Gartner forecast that mobile advertising will generate billions of dollars in revenue by the year 2013. Ty asked a great question, in effect, these figures sound great, but what if anything is really happening in the market? Who’s doing this? As the animated hologram told Will Smith’s character in the movie I, Robot: “THAT, detective, is the right question.” Some big (and small) players are making important things happen that are building the foundation for that promised market growth. Continue reading

A New Year’s resolution for Verizon and AT&T

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It’s a simple one, really: Spend a few zillion less on attack ads against each other and more on building out and resolving issues in your networks and with your handsets. That way the vast majority of the U.S. that uses one of the two services, AT&T and Verizon top executives and their multimillion-dollar Madison Avenue pitchmen and women included, can endure fewer dropped calls and enjoy more actual coverage in more areas, not just on those cute little red/orange/blue-splotched “coverage maps” in the TV spots but in real life. Continue reading

NEC looks to crack the B/OSS code

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As reported in Billing & OSS World by Editor in Chief Tim McElligott, NEC is acquiring NetCracker for about $300 million. And as Tim said, “Given the fate of mid-tier independent software vendors over the last three years – those at the $100 million mark or more – it was a matter of when, not if” Waltham, Mass.-based NetCracker would be acquired. Another great friend and colleague in this business, Elisabeth Rainge, program director of network software at IDC, accurately assessed the deal as having far more to do with the alliance between Alcatel-Lucent and the Cramer division of Amdocs or ALU’s acquisition of Motive than it does the acquisitions of similarly sized competitors such as Granite Systems by Telcordia, MetaSolv by Oracle or Syndesis by Subex.

Absolutely. This deal is another example of a company that has made its mark mainly through equipment and services acquiring a B/OSS leader to stop missing out on major network equipment contracts because it brings no OSS to the table. Continue reading