Two weeks after announcing their merger, CustomCall Data Systems Inc. and Concretio.com have closed their deal, the value of which they haven’t disclosed.
Together, the privately held billing and OSS companies now boast 70 communications service provider customers in the wireline, wireless, cable, IPTV and VoIP markets. And combining operations will give clients complete lifecycle management, CustomCall said.
“Out-of-the-box, flow-through provisioning that is seamless and highly automated is one of the primary product goals of putting our businesses together,” Frank Peregrine, CustomCall CEO, said in a prepared statement on Feb. 3, distributed on Feb. 5.
The strategy should ease back-office functions for customers, who won’t need to integrate platforms from multiple vendors. Besides billing, CustomCall offers taxation, E-911, credit score retrieval, provisioning and credit collection services.
Putting those functions in a one-stop-shop setting is bound to appeal to CustomCall and Concretio target users, and Kevin Williams, former CEO of Concretio and now executive vice president of CustomCall, agreed.
“The reaction of the marketplace has already validated our decision to combine our businesses,” Williams said in a press release. “We are even more excited than we expected by the opportunities we are seeing, even at this very early stage.”
Peregrine added that the merger has strengthened the CustomCall’s management team and finances so much that there’s “foundation to build our product portfolio and book of business quickly.”
To be sure, the combination of CustomCall and Concretio could spur smaller rivals in the rural and Tier 2 markets to consolidate to better compete as well.
“I think that as operators recognize the value in back-office software to help them reduce operational costs and improve the customer experience, that cycle can only ramp up,” Shira Levine, the directing analyst for OSS at Infonetics Research, told Billing & OSS World in January.
Meantime, the companies have taken the CustomCall name, but are keeping the CustomCall facilities in Madison, Wis., and Concretio’s operations and employees in Naperville, Ill. In addition to hiring Williams as an executive, CustomCall also has named former Concretio principal John McManus as its vice president of sales.
