WatchMark merges with Ireland’s Comnitel

After 18 months of partnering and six months of combined bidding, Bellevue, Wash., performance management software company, WatchMark, and Comnitel, a Cork, Ireland-based service management company, announced their merger today.

The combined company, now known as WatchMark-Comnitel, will sell their respective software solutions as both integrated and stand-alone products.

WatchMark has been providing performance management software to the wireless market for 10 years and has approximately 100 customers. Comnitel is a four-year-old startup that sells service quality and service level agreement (SLA) management solutions primarily to European operators.

Comnitel’s chief executive officer, Kieran Moynihan, is now WatchMark-Comnitel’s chief technology officer. WatchMark’s CTO, Richard Kateley, is the combined company’s chief operating officer. Tom Munro is chief financial officer. The company is currently in search of a CEO to manage its growth.

"As we did some joint bids together, we saw the overall potential for a 1 + 1 = 3 opportunity by combining forces," Moynihan said. "We strengthen each other’s ability to sell to each other’s respective territories."

Financial details of the deal were not disclosed. Moynihan said the deal was a merger rather than an acquisition because there would be no layoffs of any scale and that management and senior technical people would all be staying with the new company. "So it is genuinely a combining together of resources to leverage each other’s strengths," he said.

The combining of WatchMark’s performance management solution known as Prospect and Comnitel’s service assurance and service quality management solutions comes at a time when operators are looking for better-integrated solutions. "You could tell from the [requests for proposal] that operators were asking for more information about service management than they ever had before," said Heather Knox, director of marketing at WatchMark-Comnitel. <> WatchMark had begun addressing the European market about 12 months ago and now will have European headquarters in Cork, a sales support and R&D team in the UK and a 3G center of excellence in Stockholm, Sweden.

Comnitel expects to begin contributing to WatchMark’s positive cash flow soon as a number of combined bids over the last six-to-nine months come to conclusion. The company will keep the products as separate but integrated entities using standard TMF (TeleManagement Forum) interfaces.

"It gives us a stronger competitive position to be able to offer both combined and standalone products from the same vendor," Knox said.