Comverse on Monday announced it has agreed a cash-and-stock deal for U.K. messaging platform company Acision.
Comverse, which now calls itself a digital services company in the wake of its decision to offload its BSS operations earlier this year, will pay US$135 million in cash and 3.13 million in ordinary shares for Acision, in addition to agreeing to potential earnout payments of up to $35 million.
"Continued consolidation in the service provider space creates the need for strong suppliers," said Comverse CEO Philippe Tartavull. "Our acquisition of Acision underscores Comverse’s commitment to quickly building scale and market leadership in the fast-growing digital services sector."
Acision will provide Comverse with a portfolio of mobile monetisation and enterprise messaging solutions, Tartavull said.
"The combined portfolio will allow us to enable our service provider and enterprise customers to deliver and monetise a new array of advanced digital services to their customers," he added.
The merged entity will remain at Comverse’s Massachusetts headquarters under Tartavull’s leadership; its management team will be made up of executives from both companies.
The firms expect the deal to close at the end of the third quarter of this calendar year.
Comverse on Monday also published its results for fiscal Q1, reporting a 30% decline in revenue to $45.7 million. Its net loss for the three months to 30 April widened to $26.7 million from $16.1 million.
Comverse agreed to sell substantially all of its BSS operations to Amdocs in April for $272 million in cash. The deal is due to close by the end of September, but in the meantime Comverse has reclassified the business as discontinued operations.
Separately, the U.S. firm said it has brokered a deal with Deutsche Telekom that will see it provide the German telco with its multi-VAS solution, which supports the deployment of multiple services over a common infrastructure.
