Amdocs beats quarterly guidance by $6 million

Nine new or extended contracts in Amdocs’ first fiscal quarter ending Dec. 31 helped nudge the software company’s revenue to $428.3 million, $6.3 million over the top end of guidance.

Among the new contracts was a major North American wireline carrier that implemented Amdocs’ order management system for new generation services.

"That’s one of the more positive signs," said Michael Couture, vice president of marketing at Amdocs. "The mobile providers have shown more signs of growth and investing in the future and now the wireline companies are starting to move the same way."

The 26.2% increase over last year’s first quarter also was partly due to deals with Telkom South Africa for new order management software and upgraded billing and customer relationship management (CRM) platforms as well as ClarifyCRM sales to two communications service providers in Europe and one in the Asia/Pacific region and one major North American mobile operator.

Amdocs also extended contracts with mobile providers in North America and Europe for relationship management solutions that provide billing and settlement between content partners and with its Enabler system for billing next-generation services.

"New deals have an impact over time rather than big pop in the quarter, but this was a strong quarter in new sales and a positive reflection of customers being willing to make commitments and sign the contracts," Couture said.

In other news, Russian service provider, VimpelCom is consolidating its regional billing and customer care operations on Amdocs platform according to an announcement this week. VimpelCom implemented Amdocs platform in 2002 in Moscow and is now extending the platform across 52 other regions.

"It’s a huge country where operations were fragmented almost as separate entities," Couture said. "We have started consolidating the regions retiring some of their smaller system serving regional interests."

Couture said the company also expects to close on the proposed acquisition of Xacct Technologies in the coming quarter. Amdocs’ agreed to buy Xacct’s outstanding shares for $29.5 million--$13.5 million in cash and the rest in Amdocs ordinary shares.

"Our customers are looking to offer new voice and data services that are real time and use a lot of batch event processing coming from the network. The more we can do to link the network back to customer information is important and Xacct gives us that extension toward the network," Couture said.