Openet Acquires Sepro to Rapidly Accelerate its Product Strategy
octubre 30, 2003 - Openet
Thursday, 30th October 2003; Openet Telecom, a world leader in real-time charging and convergent mediation, today announced the acquisition of Sepro, the Dublin-based software developers of e-Rate™, one of the leading high-performance rating engines in the world. This is Openet's first technology acquisition and enables Openet to rapidly accelerate its real-time charging product strategy and expand its product portfolio.
Under the terms of the contract, all Sepro technology, intellectual property rights and customer contracts will transfer to Openet. A number of Sepro staff will also transfer in order to further market, sell, develop, test, support and maintain the products and their customer base.
e-Rate is a real-time, rules based rating engine designed to address the challenges that next generation networks and value-added services bring in terms of speed, volume and complexity. Together with its partner management capabilities, e-Rate enables network operators to cost-effectively manage business processes such as retail and wholesale rating with the ability to manage revenue sharing agreements with 3rd party content and commerce partners.
"Since we brought FusionWorks ActiveCharge to the market last year, we have seen a growing need for a real-time, low-latency and high-throughput rating capability within its architecture. Our customers and prospects are increasingly asking us for a rating capability, one that can handle response times in the order of 10ms (milliseconds) to 25ms depending on rating complexity," stated Joe Hogan, CTO at Openet.
"When you take latency into account on top of the sheer volume of requests coming from next generation networks and the throughput figures being demanded by our customers, it was clear to us that partnering with an adjunct rating company was not going to provide an adequate solution. By acquiring and embedding Sepro's e-Rate into FusionWorks ActiveCharge, Openet is now positioned to provide the only real-time charging solution with a fully integrated rating engine offered by a single company," Hogan added.
Network operators are increasingly becoming aware of the deficiencies of their legacy rating platforms while trying to roll out value-added services. Acquiring Sepro not only brings a market-leading rating capability to Openet's real-time charging solution, but also allows Openet to expand into the rapidly growing adjunct rating market, a logical next step for the company. Openet is now in a prime position to offer best-in-class COTS convergent mediation, real-time charging and adjunct rating to network operators world wide.
"In addition to expanding our existing product footprint, we extend our product line-up, add significant Tier 1 customers and increase our revenue stream at a stroke," said John Rainger, CEO at Openet. "We grew our revenue 76% in our last fiscal year, and this acquisition will allow us to fuel our revenue growth still further in the future. We have achieved this at a price point and in a timescale that we could not have matched through internal development. We are delighted to welcome the Sepro customers and staff to Openet, and are excited about our future together," Rainger added.
Openet will continue to support and maintain Sepro's strong client base which includes Vodafone, T-Mobile and Eurotel. The company will not comment on the commercial terms of the contract.
About Openet
About Openet
Openet is a leading worldwide provider of event processing and transaction management solutions. The Transactional Intelligence of the company's solutions extracts increased value from diverse service provider networks, enabling rapid introduction of new services and reliable, cost-effective management of existing services. Openet is focused on delivering best-in-class network edge solutions and specialized engagement processes that create business value from network activity. A global company, Openet's implementations include long-running engagements with the world's leading service providers such as British Telecom, Orange, AT&T and Verizon Wireless. For more information, visit www.openet.com.
