Telecom network major Nokia announced its deal to acquire Finland-based Comptel for EUR 347 million or $371 million as part of its software strategy.
Comptel’s revenue in 2015 was EUR 98 million with 8.7 percent operating margin.
Nokia’s strategy is to build a big software business by expanding and strengthening its software portfolio and go-to-market capabilities with additional sales capacity and a strategic partner network.
Nokia aims to combine Comptel with its OSS, BSS, analytics and cloud technology to support telecom operators for their end-to-end orchestration of NFV and SDN deployments. Nokia feels it will be more powerful in areas such as service assurance and fulfilment and the intelligence and automation to create and manage complex service offers.
Founded in 1986, Comptel has over 800 employees in 32 countries. Comptel has completed over 1,400 customer projects in more than 90 countries. Comptel processes 20 percent of world’s mobile usage data every day, orchestrates communications and digital services for more than two billion end-users daily and its largest customer has around 300 million subscribers.
The company’s major sites are in Finland, Bulgaria, Malaysia, India, the United Kingdom and Norway. Comptel will not be cutting any workforce post the acquisition.
Nokia last year completed the acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent.
Comptel would bolster Nokia’s software portfolio by adding critical solutions for catalogue-driven service orchestration and fulfillment, intelligent data processing, customer engagement, and agile service monetization.
The combination of Nokia’s Service Assurance and Comptel’s Service Orchestration portfolio would enable a dynamic closed loop between service assurance and fulfillment that simplifies management of complex heterogeneous networks.
When combined with Nokia’s Cloudband and Nuage, Nokia would be able to provide customers with complete, end-to-end orchestration of complex Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) deployments.
“The timing of the Comptel purchase is important as our customers are changing the way they build and operate their networks. Telecom operators are turning to software to provide more intelligence, automate more of their operations, and realize the efficiency gains that virtualization promises,
said Bhaskar Gorti, president of Nokia’s Applications & Analytics business group.
