Ericsson has agreed to buy Telcocell, in a bid to strengthen its system integration capabilities in North America.
The acquisition, announced earlier this week, complements Ericsson’s expertise in consulting and systems integration experience in converged charging, custom development, quality assurance and production support for BSS.
"Multi-vendor business support systems integration and consulting is of high strategic importance for Ericsson worldwide,” Paolo Colella, head of consulting and systems integration at Ericsson said. “Acquiring capabilities from Telcocell will further strengthen our ability to offer full ICT transformation capabilities to our customers."
The deal is expected to close by the third quarter of 2013. Upon the completion of the acquisition, 200 services employees and consultants based in Canada and US are expected to join Ericsson.
The acquisition comes days after Ericsson announced plans to relocate its head of business unit support solutions, Per Borgklint, to Silicon Valley, in an attempt to fully leveraging its recent acquisitions made in US – Telcordia, Microsoft Mediaroom and ConceptWave.
According to Ericsson, the company currently has some 15,000 employees in North America and 20% of the support solutions sales last year were in the region.
Ericsson’s support solutions business unit develops software-based solutions for OSS and BSS, real-time enablement, multi-screen and on-demand TV, compression and m-commerce.