Ovum: Amdocs acquire Qpass

Jean-Charles Doineau at Ovum writes about Amdocsacquisition of Qpass, "a content-billing vendor specialising in mobile content micro-billing. Qpass will cost Amdocs some $275 million in cash."

Doineau thinks the "acquisition makes a lot of sense for Amdocs. It consolidates the billing and billing mediation footprint of the company in the US, building upon the company's strategy to enable the "digital supermarket". Qpass has become famous over time by securing almost 100% of the US GSM market for mobile content delivery solutions. Over time, it has been one of the few companies offering a managed service delivery platform (SDP) solution with real market success."

Doineau concludes:

After high expectations of a "digital supermarket" developing as part of mobile service providers' offerings, expectations have now become more realistic. Most of the service providers that had been betting on the mobile supermarket business model are now getting a more realistic approach and are outsourcing some of their own SDPs to managed services companies. Newcomers in that field are looking for a turnkey approach, mixing both contents and distribution enablers. That's exactly what Qpass has been setting up since the very beginning, certainly paving the way in the industry.