Wants to compete in “larger TOMS solutions space”
NEC subsidiary NetCracker has outlined ambitious plans to become a major player right across the OSS-BSS and service delivery markets.
NEC is taking all its element management, network management, service delivery platform, CRM, billing and SaaS provision capability, and merging it with Netcracker’s OSS capabilities to create one telecoms software entity.
The aim is that the new unit will compete with the major OSS and service platform players such as HP, Oracle and Amdocs, across a portfolio that NetCracker CEO Andrew Feinberg said would include customer management, product management, revenue management, device management, service fulfillment and assurance, IT platforms, resource management and network management.
Feinberg said the elements “have been, or will be, productised, and natively integrated into the NetCracker platform.”
“We are not about to bring slideware to the market,” Feinberg said. “We will provide true end to end solutions, not a bunch of acquisitions bunched together at the last minute.”
Feinberg will head up the new unit which will be an autonomous P&L unit with NEC, and although he was unable to say how many people would staff the new unit, he said that it “tap very heavily” into NEC’s global workforce of 150,000.
Feinberg said the move is a response to customer demands for an end to end provider that can help service providers manage and introduce new services more quickly, and then monitor and manage users and services more efficiently.
He added that there would be further M&A activity driven by NEC, as gaps in the portfolio emerge.
So is NetCracker ready to take on the other players in this market? One area of focus will be its ability to compete in the service delivery and management space – a strategically crucial area for operators who need to be able to compete with over the top providers, and meet growing demands for cloud-based services and SaaS..
Feinberg said that NEC’s existing SDP is proven by its deployment with NTT DoCoMo, where it has been “battle-tested” and is one of the “biggest implementations”of an SDP in the world.
He also said that NEC’s billing capabilities were well advanced, and currently support 50k transactions a second in its Japanese implementation.
NEPs have increasingly attempted to move more into the OSS and service delivery space, as the equipment market becomes ever more competitive. NEC is hoping to use its Japanese experience as a proof point of its capability to become a service enabler and operations partner for operators and service providers.
NEC told Mobile Europe in a private briefing at Mobile World Congress that it wanted to be able to act in an end to end manner, helping service providers become providers of cloud services and SaaS. This NetCracker announcement appears to be a critical element of that, bundling up the vendor’s TOMS (Telecoms Operations and Management Software) capabilities into one place.
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