Having announced a $30 million round of financing on Jan. 14, the San Mateo, Calif.-based company has now revealed how some of that money has been used -- to buy a rival. (See Telco Analytics Firm Raises $30M.)

Guavus has acquired Montreal-based Neuralitic Systems for an undisclosed sum. Neuralitic's tools organize and extract information from data generated in mobile networks, presenting it for use by customer care and marketing teams.

Guavus believes the combination of its own tools, which sift the masses of data produced by networks, devices and subscribers for useful information, and Neuralitic's applications, which are optimized to identify the volumes of data used by each subscriber, will help it tap into additional major Tier 1 accounts. Guavus already boasts Sprint Nextel Corp. and (apparently) Verizon Communications Inc. as customers.

Neuralitic has a number of mobile operator customers, including Singapore's StarHub Pte. Ltd. and Thailand's TrueMove Co. Ltd. (See TrueMove Analyzes Data With Neuralitic.)

Since it was formed in 2007, Neuralitic had raised $20 million in VC backing from companies such as BlackBerry Partners Fund, BDC Venture Capital, Vertex Venture Capital and GO Capital LP, as well as Export Development Canada (EDC), which led its most recent round in Jan. 2011.

Analytics is one of the hottest Service Provider Information Technology (SPIT) sectors currently. It's likely to witness further M&A action in 2013 as major vendors and aggressive challengers alike look for strategic acquisitions that can cut out years of R&D work and flesh out their BSS offerings to mobile operators.

— Ray Le Maistre, International Managing Editor, Light Reading