Management World: NEC, NetCracker talk post-acquisition plans

ORLANDO – With the formal closure of the deal not even a month old, executives from NEC and NetCracker used the Management World show to talk about plans to tackle the market together, including demonstrations of joint solutions for device management and software-as-a-service (SaaS).

When announced this summer, the two companies said NetCracker’s network and service management expertise would dovetail nicely with NEC’s network equipment portfolio, especially its IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) offerings. They also talked up the possibility of joint vertical solutions targeting specific carrier needs.

Both approaches were part of the companies’ discussions this week. Several NEC “c-level” executives made the trip to Orlando to explain the company’s plans for NetCracker, including Dr. Botaro Hirosaki, NEC senior executive vice president and member of the NEC board.

In presentations and a press conference at the show, the executives outlined three core areas of joint focus – network and IT optimization, service acceleration and content monetization. Service providers moving to NGN/IMS networks will benefit greatly from the combined company’s abilities to provide not only the network equipment to facilitate that move but the underlying OSS infrastructure allowing them to manage both network and IT resources from a single platform, according to Andrew Feinberg, NetCracker president and CEO.

At the show, NEC and Netcracker demonstrated two joint solutions that combined technologies from the two companies: the device management demo showed how operators could better monitor customer usage and even target content and services to specific devices; on the SaaS front, the solution focused on adding NetCracker’s advanced provisioning capabilities to the NEC SaaS platform.

In addition, NetCracker contributed to a TM Forum Catalyst project on managing syndicated services, demonstrating how carriers can more quickly launch next-generation services.

Finally, NetCracker announced that is OSS platform has been selected by Videotron, Canada’s third-largest cable operator – to help deliver new services. Specifically, NetCracker will deploy its Resource Inventory module and will also provide professional services, helping the operator replace legacy systems for physical and logical network inventory management. Videotron will rely on NetCracker to help it discover and reconcile network assets on its current cable plant as well as on a new wireless infrastructure it is building after having recently won 3G licenses in its markets, a NetCracker spokeswoman said.