Nokia agreed to acquire Comptel Corporation, a telecom software company based in Helsinki, Finland, for approximately EUR 347 million in cash.
Comptel offers solutions for catalogue-driven service orchestration and fulfillment, intelligent data processing, customer engagement, and agile service monetization. It processes 20 percent of world’s mobile usage data every day, orchestrates communications and digital services for more than two billion end-users daily and its largest customer has around 300 million subscribers. In 2015, Comptel’s revenue was EUR 98 million with an 8.7 percent operating margin. The company was founded in 1986 and has approximately 800 employees. Outside of Finland its major sites include Bulgaria, Malaysia, India, the United Kingdom and Norway.
Nokia said the deal will advance its software strategy and provide service providers with a comprehensive solution to design, deliver, orchestrate and assure communications and digital services across physical, virtual and hybrid networks. Nokia’s ambition is to build a standalone software business at scale by expanding and strengthening its software portfolio and go-to-market capabilities with additional sales capacity and a strategic partner network.
The combination of Nokia’s Service Assurance portfolio and Comptel’s Service Orchestration portfolio would enable a dynamic closed loop between service assurance and fulfillment that simplifies management of complex heterogeneous networks. When combined with Nokia’s Cloudband(TM) and Nuage(TM) portfolios, Nokia would be able to provide customers with complete, end-to-end orchestration of complex Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) deployments.
“Nokia is committed to building its software business and is backing its commitment with strategic investments. The timing of the Comptel purchase is important as our customers are changing the way they build and operate their networks. They are turning to software to provide more intelligence, automate more of their operations, and realize the efficiency gains that virtualization promises. We want to help them by offering one of the industry’s broadest and most advanced portfolios. Comptel helps us do that,” stated Bhaskar Gorti, president of Nokia’s Applications & Analytics business group.
