Oct. 24, 2006

In a $219 million deal, Oracle recently acquired MetaSolv Software, a software developer for the telecommunications industry.

MetaSolv's products address order management and provisioning, service activation, inventory management, network mediation and overall configuration management.

Oracle will position MetaSolv within its Communications Global Business Unit. MetaSolv's functionality will overlap some of the telco-centric billing and revenue management features that came aboard with the acquisition of Portal Software.

For a company the size of Oracle, the Portal and MetaSolv acquisitions are rather small.

The issue of technology overlap between different product sets is not as important as Oracle's desire to get deeper into key verticals like telco.

But telco customers would do well to ask Oracle whether the company intends to keep Portal and MetaSolv on separate tracks, or whether there is some plan to combine functionality into a standard platform over time.

Oracle's plan for MetaSolv ("tie it to its other service products to create a complete 'campaign-to-cash' system for communication companies," according to AMR Research) sounds something like the message Oracle had around Portal Software, so some clarification may be in order.

MetaSolv customers include Vodafone, BT, T-Mobile, Sprint, and Qwest.

MetaSolv had 250 employees in its Plano, Texas headquarters.

Source: Line 56