McElligott

Peace on Earth

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…and mercy mild, all God’s service providers and enterprise IT shops reconciled.

To be sure, there is plenty of disharmony and cutthroat competition in the networking, software and telecommunications industries–and in all industries–and unless our Creator were to suddenly begin to endow us all with a quite different set of characteristics, it will always be thus. Yet especially during this holiday season it is encouraging to see groups that have previously been best characterized as “warring factions” learning from each other and (dare I say it) working together. 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