OSS Observer Dissects Arantech Acquisition

By Patrick Kelly, Research Director, Analysys Mason Global Telecom Software Research Programme

Tektronix Communications announced on April 7, 2009, that it acquired private software supplier Arantech. The terms of the acquisition are not being disclosed. Arantech had revenue of approximately $35 million in 2008. Growth year over year was 25 percent.

We are positive on this acquisition as it leverages both the assets within the Tektronix portfolio and provides a path for high growth in a segment that is becoming more important to communications service providers (CSPs) in creating more loyalty from their large base of subscribers.

The market forces increasing the awareness of customer experience are in part being driven by the commoditization of telecom services – primarily voice – and the threat posed by new participants in the telecommunications economy that offer premium services over a broadband network.

Customer Experience Management (CEM) has many facets because to effectively manage the customer experience, different types of interactions between the customer and the CSP will occur over the lifecycle of the customer. The areas that CSPs are actively investing in CEM include call center customer care, which entails threading together incidents to avoid churn, order to activation of new services, self service channels, service and network performance in real time, application transaction monitoring, mobile device management, more precise marketing of new services, and personalization. Arantech addresses several of these problems and is an acknowledged pioneer in the CEM segment.

Arantech’s flagship CEM solution, touchpoint, enables mobile operators and CSPs to understand in real time how their service is being delivered to each customer or sets of customers, and whether a customer’s problem in service delivery is linked to a handset problem, a service delivery problem, a provisioning issue or a network issue.

Arantech specializes in assessing mobile consumers’ overall experience of voice and data services. It relies on data obtained from switch management and probe systems to assess and provide frequent reports by cell site, location, customer group, and handset type. Arantech’s approach has gained strong initial acceptance among large mobile CSPs, primarily in Europe. In markets where there is significant competitive pressure around quality of a broad range of services, CSPs have been willing to do the work to tap a range of data sources so they can gain the customer service specific analysis provided by Arantech’s touchpoint.