With reports that Amdocs is to acquire Matrixx Software for US$200m and Qvantel has completed its purchase of Optiva, the festive season has been a busy time for BSS. The two deals are different with Qvantel buying revenue management specialist Optiva to grow its business and strengthen its position as operators turn to AI-driven automation. In contrast, Matrixx presents just another charging acquisition for Amdocs, following on from its 2020 purchase of Openet, although Matrixx’s strength in the MVNO sector and some of the unique charging features it offers are likely to have been attractions for Amdocs.
The last six months has seen significant movement as BSS consolidates, with NEC buying CSG for approximately US$2.9 billion in a deal that adds to its ownership of Netcracker. The accelerated arrival of AI has seen companies need to invest to prepare for greater automation, adoption of agentic AI and new product offerings and service models across telecoms. Few small and mid-market companies are able to rapidly invest and re-tool their charging products so the options are to merge or sink.
The Qvantel Optiva deal highlights this. “Telecoms has been slow to evolve, but the opportunity ahead is enormous,” said Tero Kivisaari, the president of Qvantel. “Today’s customers expect more, AI is opening new possibilities and enhanced digital services are where the next wave of value will come from. The combination of Qvantel and Optiva creates a future-ready end to end monetisation foundation to support that growth. Together, we can help operators close that gap faster and turn that promise into results.”
Qvality and qvantity
Qvantel claims to be seeing benefits already with four new customer wins in the last three months, including a multi-country group deployment across APAC, the Americas and Europe that uses both Qvantel Flex and the Optiva Charging Engine. The combined company now serves 70 operators in 40 countries with 1,000 professionals in its workforce.
The increased scale is a benefit but so is the ability to combine technology. The Qvantel Flex Suite, including Optiva’s software, provides no/low code, AI-first, cloud-native architecture giving commercial and product teams greater control over offers, pricing and processes, reducing time-to-market and cost of change.
Turning to the Matrixx deal, Omdia analyst James Crawshaw has commented in a LinkedIn post that the combination of Amdocs and Matrixx would result in revenue share in the 5G charging and policy vendor sector of around 23%, making it the largest vendor by revenue, according to Omdia estimates. Although counting operators Telstra and Swisscom among its investors, with both operators also customers, and continuing to win new business, Matrixx may have accepted the Amdocs offer as its best available option in a rapidly transforming market, with other suitors either being acquired themselves, distracted by their own acquisitions or unable to offer more.
The shake-out leaves a charging and policy sector broadly composed of large players such as Huawei, Amdocs, Ericsson, Netcracker and Nokia and a shrinking set of smaller companies that will be assessing where and how they fit into this transforming market.
George Malim