Recent evidence suggests that global giant Nokia could be well on their way to purchasing the Finland-based software telecommunication business, Comptel, in a deal that equals around $371 million.
Originally founded in 1986, in Helsinki, Finland, Comptel is well-known across the globe for its ability to develop comprehensive software for operation support systems, (OSS), the solutions used by telecom service providers to assist with the configuration and management of networks, including the management of faults. Nokia plans to combine Comptel with its own business OSS offering, cloud infrastructure, and analytics to offer an end-to-end portfolio of SDN and NFV deployment services.
In a recent press release, the company commented that they would be giving their customers a “new level of automation“.
The Deal is Already Greenlighted
Comptel is currently a public company which has been trading within the Helsinki Nasdaq OMX ever since 1999. Today, they have around 800 employees across 30 different companies. Up until this point, the shares in Comptel have rarely risen above €2.50 throughout the company’s entire history. Although Comptel have already approved and greenlighted the deal, Nokia has offered a premium of around €3.05 per share to help encourage approval from shareholders.
According to the president of Nokia’s applications and analytics business group, Bhaskar Gorti, Nokia are committed to building their software presence and building on existing goals with a range of strategic investments. The timing of this new Comptel purchase is incredibly important, as upcoming customers change the way Nokia operate and build their network solutions. Now, the business is turning to software solutions that will help to offer more intelligence to customers, automate more of their operations, and ensure the efficiency gains that come from virtualisation. For Nokia, the new development is all about offering their customers the most advanced and widespread portfolio on the market, and they believe that the Comptel acquisition will help them to step even closer towards that goal.
A New Direction for Nokia
Since the company officially stepped away from the consumer mobile phone market a few years ago, Nokia has been focusing their efforts on two core divisions of their network – Nokia technologies, which is the part of the business that develops customer-focused products, and Nokia Networks – a broadband infrastructure business. Lately, the company has been investing more broadly into the latter concern “Nokia Networks”, snapping up the networking phenomenon “Alcatel-Lucent” in a huge $16.6 billion deal before they went on to purchase Gain speed – a company that specialises in offering Distributed Access Architecture services for those in the cable environment.
Not so long ago, Nokia also purchased the network performance organisational business “Deepfield”, in an attempt to further boost their portfolio. Right now, Nokia’s offer to purchase Comptel is set to be realised somewhere towards the end of February, and it will last for about one month.
