If the proposed acquisition of Nokia Siemens Networks 's BSS assets is completed successfully in the first half of 2013, it will give Lucas Skoczkowski, the CEO of Canadian Service Provider Information Technology (SPIT) vendor Redknee Inc. (Toronto/London AIM: RKN), the scale he has been craving for a number of years. (See Redknee to Pay $52M for NSN's BSS Unit.)
Skoczkowski has been working on a three-element strategy for the past few years, he told Light Reading during a recent interview: developing a broader and stronger telecom back office functionality product set for communications service provider (CSP) customers; expanding the company's partnership program, particularly with systems integrators (SIs); and doing targeted acquisitions to give the company greater reach and scale.
Redknee's Lucas Skoczkowski
Redknee, best known for its converged billing and CRM systems, has been adding to its portfolio, and working closely with Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT), to offer an alternative BSS product set to telecom operators in the past few years, with a particular focus on developing cloud-based functionality. (See Redknee Gets Cloudy With Windows Azure.)
It has also brokered a number of partnerships with major software firms and SIs, including Accenture , Tech Mahindra Ltd. and Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. , as well as Microsoft. (See Redknee, Tech Mahindra Box BSS.)
The NSN acquisition, for which the CEO had secured the required capital, would give Redknee the scale Skoczkowski has been seeking: He wants Redknee to be a company with annual revenues of more than US$100 million. And he has been looking hard. (See Is That a Redknee War Chest? )
The CEO has been in discussions with up to five companies "on both sides of the Atlantic" regarding a merger or acquisition to boost Redknee's subscriber management and real-time processing capabilities.
"We need more customers and more employees … it's all about creating value for our customers, and size matters," he stated. "Whatever we do, we need to be sustainable and have good long-term opportunities."
If he can close the NSN deal, Skoczkowski will have become the consolidator he has long wanted to be and have the scale to match his ambitions.
— Ray Le Maistre, International Managing Editor, Light Reading
