NetCracker

My pilgrimage to the musical motherland: U2

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…and other dispatches from Dublin during Management World 2011

Aye and Begorrah. The week I traveled to Ireland, President Obama did as well. Honestly not sure why he did not consult with me to sync up schedules…at any rate, the big news of the week for me professionally was attending an event-within-an-event, featuring the team I lead at Stratecast, at the world’s largest IT show for the communications industry. The Innovation Spotlight at Management World 2011 was built around the Rat Pack/10 to Watch report our team publishes each year identifying and analyzing the market’s hottest emerging companies. Check out some great videos from the event here.

Management World (MW) was chock-full of meetings each day plus working breakfasts and dinners, but in a few brief free moments I was able to snap a decent pictorial’s worth of pertinent pix. 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