METASOLV LIVING LARGE AGAIN WITH EXPANDED PORTFOLIO

It has been 12 months since MetaSolv acquired Lat45 and six since the acquisition of Nortel Networks' service commerce business. Last week the company broke its silence on the merits of those moves and said it will announce an OEM agreement with CoManage this week to include its TrueSource network reconciliation functionality with MetaSolv's inventory management solution.

MetaSolv's acquisitions provided dividends during the latest quarter, boosting its percentage of overall revenue from Tier 1 customers to more 50%. It also picked up four new wireless operators and expanded its international presence with eight customer wins outside North America.

Although overall revenues were down this quarter to $24.7 million, compared with $38.4 million in the previous quarter, Curtis Holmes, chief operating officer of MetaSolv, put a positive spin on the quarter by pointing to key customer wins across all the regions of the world and across the company's complete portfolio.

When MetaSolv acquired Nortel's software business, the activation platform from Architel seemed to be the big prize. But with carriers shifting their priorities, the broadness of its portfolio is proving to be as valuable. “[MetaSolv] is taking what it can get and focusing on the basics,” said Elizabeth Rainge, program director of OSS at IDC.

A report issues last month by RHK claimed that activation and network resource management have the most to gain from projected service provider spending. The biggest part of network resource management is inventory, and MetaSolv's new partnership with CoManage could be the right inventory strategy at the right time.

“Inventory by itself is not what it once was in terms of opening the door for solutions sales. It is still important, but the [related] stranded assets play is catching the momentum because it's about controlling assets and expenses,” Rainge said.

About a year ago, CoManage sold its flagship Integrated Service Manager product and built TrueSource, a network inventory reconciliation product that identifies stranded equipment assets in the network using both network and service discovery.

“Today, discovery is finding devices in the network but not a lot of detail about them. Once you have that detail, you can really derive value from reconciling the inventory as intended and the network as is,” said Dave Nelson, CEO and co-founder of CoManage. The two companies expect to have a deliverable product in the third quarter.

“We wanted to discover not only elements in the network, but where those elements are and how they are being used and the services that are riding them, and CoManage was clearly on that path,” said Jim Janicki, CEO at MetaSolv.

MetaSolv's primary competitors in the inventory space, Cramer Systems and Granite Systems, also have made moves to tap the well of stranded assets. Cramer announced last week a partnership that incorporates its inventory system with Sheer Networks' auto-discovery capabilities for network reconciliation. Granite, which revamped its flagship Xpercom product last year, renaming it Xng (pronounced “zing”), built the gatewayXng module for reconciling network elements.