Intec Completes Singl.eView Acquisition

– Leading OSS provider enters retail billing solution market, increases staff to over 1300 –

Atlanta/London, August 31, 2004 – Intec Telecom Systems PLC announced that it has successfully completed the $74.5 million acquisition of the 'Singl.eView' retail billing software division from ADC Telecommunications, Inc. The award-winning Singl.eView product line, widely regarded to be one of the top retail billing solutions available, is in use at over 70 Tier 1 and Tier 2 carriers in 17 countries, including Deutsche Telekom, Virgin Mobile, Hutchison 3G, Optus, and Reliance. The deal approximately doubles Intec’s staff team, adding over 630 new employees worldwide, and creating a large services team of over 680 professionals.

Intec CEO Kevin Adams, added, “We believe this transaction makes Intec the leading OSS products company in the world with over 450 customers and 600 installations, including 60% of the world’s top 100 carriers. With nearly 1000 people developing and implementing our products we have an outstanding depth of capability to offer to customers.”

The acquisition of Singl.eView has been welcomed by customers and business partners alike. According to John Bickmore, Director of Billing Services, SingTel Optus, which uses both Singl.eView and Intec’s InterconnecT and Inter-mediatE products, “Intec has a big presence in Asia and we are therefore very pleased to see Singl.eView, one of our most important applications, having such strong local support from a global company.”

“Singl.eView, running on HP-UX servers, provides our customers a reliable platform for demanding, high-volume carrier billing projects and has the flexibility to meet the performance and availability needs demanded by next-generation wireless services deployments,” adds Ron Eller, Vice President and General Manager, TSG Enterprise Solution Alliances, Hewlett-Packard.

“HP has well established relationships with both Intec and the ADC Singl.eView teams, with several joint customers in every major region globally,” continues Eller. “With the acquisition of Singl.eView by Intec, we look forward to continued success in our partnership by providing innovative solutions, helping our customers to meet the evolving needs of their enterprise.”

About Singl.eView Dynamic Transaction Management
Singl.eView is an award-winning product that extends the traditional billing model to support rating and billing for any type of billing event, regardless of class of service, customer type, product or payment method. The Singl.eView product suite is comprised of six solution components:

Rating and Transaction Engine - The Singl.eView Rating and Transaction Engine is an open, rules-driven, dynamic transaction processing system. It generates charges by processing events from multiple sources, including network devices, mediation systems and service delivery platforms.

Convergent Billing - The Singl.eView Convergent Billing module supports billing, invoicing and accounts receivable processing. Through the use of a customer account model, Singl.eView Convergent Billing offers billing and invoicing capabilities for a broad range of customer types, from the most basic residential customer to large and complex corporate hierarchies, as well as for a broad and extensible range of services. Singl.eView Convergent Billing’s expression-based charging engine supports a variety of charging algorithms, including but not limited to usage-based charging, service bundle charging, multiple discounting algorithms and taxation and other regulatory charges.

Commerce Engine - The Singl.eView Commerce Engine is a real-time charging and balance management solution. Optimised for support of prepaid and premium interactive services, Commerce Engine enables real-time service authorization, advice of charge and concurrent account usage for multiple devices. Commerce Engine provides the flexibility that allows customers to be offered the same level of services regardless of the method of payment.

Process Engine - The Singl.eView Process Engine is a rules-driven work flow and contact management system that is designed to support customer care and operations business processes. Through the use of a configurable GUI and scripting functions, Singl.eView Process Engine is designed to improve customer loyalty by ensuring timely and consistent responses to customer issues.

Lifecycle Management Suite - Singl.eView Lifecycle Management Suite is an enterprise catalogue for managing the product and service life-cycle. Through the use of open standards, LMS extends across internal and external systems to manage the launch of new product offerings, reducing both time and cost to market.

Market Solutions - The capabilities of the modules described above can be deployed in a timely and cost-effective manner through the application of pre-configured solutions targeted at specific business areas or industry models. Available solutions address a number of functional areas, including wireless services, IP/data services, customer management capabilities, payment assurance processes and financial assurance support.

Technology overview
The Singl.eView product suite has a scalable three-tier architecture that delivers the cost and quality benefits of commercial off-the-shelf software:

Modularity - The Rating and Transaction Engine is the core of all Singl.eView deployments. All other Singl.eView modules are optional and can be deployed as part of an initial installation or with a subsequent upgrade.

Flexibility - Singl.eView functionality may be customized and extended as part of a customer’s implementation through the use of configured expressions, rather than coding. This approach allows customers to adapt the system to their business as it grows and changes. By maintaining backward-compatibility of the core modules, Singl.eView customers are able to take advantage of new features through timely upgrades.

Openness - Singl.eView includes an interoperability package that supports open access to application functionality through industry standard interface mechanisms, including EAI tools.

Internationalization - Singl.eView supports localization of language, currencies, number formats, calendars and regulatory and taxation rules. With the exception of Process Engine, Singl.eView modules support double byte languages, with Unicode support to be delivered in the version 6.00 release in late 2004. Singl.eView has been deployed in non-English languages, including German and Thai.

Scalability - Singl.eView has proven scalability, as evidenced by the production systems at customer installations with subscriber numbers ranging from thousands to more than ten million.

About Intec Telecom Systems
Intec Telecom Systems is the world’s leading Operations Support Systems (“OSS”) product vendor for fixed, mobile and next-generation networks (i.e. WLAN, 3G and IP), with more than 570 installations of its products worldwide in over 400 customers. Founded in 1997, Intec was listed on the London Stock Exchange (Code: ITL.L) in June 2000. In 2003 Intec reported revenues of £50.7 million, with adjusted net earnings after tax of £4.1 million.

Intec’s product portfolio includes:
 - Singl.eView™ - dynamic transaction management/retail billing
 - Inter-mediatE™ - billing telecom mediation solution
 - InterconnecT Billing - inter-carrier billing including US CABS and ITU-based settlement
 - Inter-activatE™ - flow-through provisioning and service activation
 - Intec CPM™ - end-to-end content partner management
 - Intec DCP™ (Dynamic Charging Platform) – a real-time pre/post-paid charging interface between the network and the back office

Intec’s telecom billing software customer base includes, among others, BellSouth, BellSouth Peru, Brazil Telecom, Cable & Wireless, Cesky Telecom (Czech Republic), China Unicom, COLT Telecommunications, EBT (Taiwan), Eircom (Ireland), Energis, France Telecom, Hutchison 3G, Maxis (Malaysia), Nitel (Nigeria), Reliance (India), Singtel Optus (Australia), O2 Ireland, Orange, Telecom Argentina, Telecom Egypt, Telecom Italia, Tiscali, TPSA (Poland), Swisscom, T-Mobile International, Telia (Sweden), Telefonica, Telkom South Africa, Telstra, US Cellular, Westel (Hungary), Vodafone, VimpelCom (Russia), Vivo (Brasil) and Verizon. For more information, see the Intec website at www.intecbilling.com.

More Telecommunication News

InfoWorld RSS Feed
InfoWorld - Information Technology News, Computer Networking & Security

Top 10: Bracing for Gustav, Oracle and Google woes
This is typically one of the slowest weeks of the year for IT news, but the approach of Hurricane Gustav has Gulf Coast IT departments in full-out preparedness mode and the rest of the country anxiously watching with sharp memories of Hurricane Katrina, which hit that coast and devastated New Orleans on Aug. 29 three years ago. Also in the news were woes with an Oracle forum upgrade and Google offering credit to paying customers of its online Apps suite, to compensate for three Gmail outages earlier this month.
Comcast sets monthly bandwidth limit for customers
Comcast, the largest provider of cable-based broadband service in the U.S., will limit residential customers to 250GB of bandwidth a month beginning Oct. 1, the company announced late Thursday.
Performance-improvement integral to Windows 7, IE8
Fixing performance issues that have plagued previous versions of its Windows client OS and Internet Explorer (IE) browser are key development goals for the next versions of those products, Microsoft has revealed in company blogs.
Google introduces Android apps store
Google unveiled on Thursday its plans for a store where mobile users can find Android applications, a concept similar to the iPhone's App Store.
Sprint's WiMax service to include local features
Sprint Nextel will put location-based services front and center on its Xohm WiMax service, offering a portal with widgets for local weather, traffic, events, reviews, and other information.
Nortel uses USB drive to secure remote work
Nortel hopes to tackle the security of remote work with an "office on a stick," a USB drive that can link an employee's PC with a corporate VPN and keep all the information from a session encrypted.
Bluetooth will be missing from Google Android
While developers have been hard at work building Android applications that can use GPS, Wi-Fi, and cameras, they just discovered they likely won't be able to offer applications that use one common mobile phone feature: Bluetooth.
Intel: WiMax to slash device's time to market
The certification process for WiMax devices will allow vendors to get new products out to mobile broadband users in one-third the time it takes to put a phone on a carrier's 3G network, Intel said Thursday at its developer conference.
Comcast: No new traffic management plan yet
Comcast has made no final decisions on how to manage network congestion, despite news reports Wednesday that it will slow traffic for heavy users for up to 20 minutes during times of peak network use.
Update: Ericsson, STMicro to form mobile chip venture
Ericsson and STMicroelectronics will form a joint venture to build semiconductors and platforms for mobile devices, the companies said Wednesday.

COEH Home Page