SPIT Bits: Now It's Ixia's Turn...

Netcracker Technology Corp. has landed itself a role in Allstream Corp. 's BSS transformation program, supplying the alternative Canadian enterprise service provider with its price-quotation management and product catalog tools. Expect to see a lot of NetCracker if you're attending the upcoming Management World 2012 shindig in Dublin, where the NEC Corp. (Tokyo: 6701) subsidiary is the lead sponsor. Expect to hear some chat about its planned acquisition of Convergys Corp. (NYSE: CVG)'s BSS business. (See NEC to Buy Convergys Unit for $449M, NetCracker Plays End-to-End Game and Analysts Mull NetCracker's New Buy.)

You can get all the show floor news and Guinness-fueled gossip ahead of, and at, the Dublin event by visiting our special Management World 2012 show site.

Finnish OSS vendor Comptel Corp. (Nasdaq, Helsinki: CTL1V), which will also be in Dublin, has been busy recently. It announced a €10.4 million ($13.4 million) loss for the first quarter, but this was mainly due to an impairment charge and additional investments designed to ultimately boost revenues, which increased by nearly 19 percent year-on-year to €19.9 million ($25.7 million) in the first three months of this year. It also settled its dispute with Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) and announced a mediation system deal with Telefónica SA (NYSE: TEF) in Central America. (See Telefónica Central America Uses Comptel's OSS, Comptel Loses €10.4M in Q1, Comptel Under the Cosh and Comptel Looks to Shift Up a Gear.)

Software and services giant CA Technologies (Nasdaq: CA) is in growth mode, announcing a 14 percent hike in full fiscal year revenues to $4.8 billion, and a 15 percent increase in net profits to $951 million. CA is another company heavily involved with the Dublin show, where it is participating in one of the Catalyst demonstrations, "Resilient Cloud: Maintaining Service in the Face of Developing Threats."

Australian national operator Telstra Corp. Ltd. (ASX: TLS; NZK: TLS) has launched a new service for enterprises called Application Assured Networking, which gives the operator's business customers greater visibility into the applications running over their wide area networks. The carrier, which has worked with Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU) on the development of the service, is keen to stress how network data is presented to users in a way that non-IT personnel can view and understand what's happening on the network.

In the future, the service, which is based on capabilities housed in the edge router network infrastructure rather than at the customers' premises or in a data center, will allow enterprise users to manage the bandwidth allocated to individual applications.

Telstra's not the first operator to utilize the applications-aware capabilities that AlcaLu can add to its service routers -- Belgacom SA (Euronext: BELG) is also offering such as service. (See Belgacom Gets App Assurance From AlcaLu.)

In other SPIT news:

— Ray Le Maistre, International Managing Editor, Light Reading