Livewire: The Communications, Media and Entertainment Blog: Lifecycle of Billing Packages

The world of acquisitions and mergers has not left the billing package domain alone. A company invests heaps of dollars to create a market leading billing package and from there the package evolves not by itself but again supported by investments from the parent company. This is a must for any billing package to grow as the market leader in its domain. But, all of a sudden, it undergoes a turmoil and gets sold out to a new owner. Before you conclude on your feelings towards the packages, I would like to tell you that this seems to be a very common thing in this part of technology world.

Oracle Communications BRM, a billing package offering from Oracle for CSPs was once with Portal Software. It was called Portal Infranet and renamed to Oracle BRM. Oracle's acquisition of Portal Software was part of its strategy to create an end to end oracle stack for a CSP. Portal Infranet has been famous with Data Billing all the while and now Oracle BRM can also do the mobile prepaid rating effectively. Oracle has also acquired eServe Global recently, a Prepaid Charging company ( http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/076239 ) . We have to see how Oracle marries it with their current BSS stack offering.

Comverse Kenan story is also interesting. It has changed 3 hands in last 10 years. Oldest hand that I am aware of is Lucent Technologies where Kenan was marketed as Arbor BP, part of the BSS stack with other components like Arbor OM (Order Management) in place. It was bought by CSG from Lucent, a US based company and got rechristened as Kenan BP. Later on, CSG sold out Kenan BP to Comverse. Kenan FX, the current version of post paid billing system has been packaged into Comverse One, which has the Real Time Billing System, Mediation and CRM capabilities. The Kenan billing team has been largely successful in handling these transitions seamlessly to its huge customer base across the globe.

There has been news in the market in the last months that Intec is being bought out by CSG (http://www.intecbilling.com/24sep2010.aspx). We have to see how this transpires for the leading Intec Singl.eView, Intermediate and Interconnect billing packages. Intec has a very good client base and CSG is quite strong in a few Goes which could make this acquisition work out very well for both the companies. We only have to wait and watch.

Have you been watching these dynamics? What is your understanding?