Huawei, like its main carrier equipment rivals, needs to ride the wave of convergence between telecoms and IT, a trend which is driving many acquisitions. The Chinese firm's latest move is to buy Fastwire to improve its capabilities in the OSS/network management field.
Fastwire is an Australian firm previously owned by Macquarie Bank and its own management. It offers network inventory, fault management and performance management systems and its customers include the UK's BT, China Unicom, SingTel, Telstra and Vodafone.
Leroy Blimegger, SVP of global technical services at Huawei, said the Chinese company has enjoyed 23% year-on-year growth in the OSS sector, mainly by selling through its professional services group, but now aims to build a portfolio of commercial products to sell directly to operators.
Its competitors are going the same way, and OSS specialists will have plenty of acquisition opportunities in the coming years, in a trend that was sparked by Ericsson's purchase of Telcordia two years ago, which it has followed with several other smaller deals in the telco IT space.