Telecom software firm Aricent is understood to be looking at setting up a Centre of Excellence (CoE) at its Bangalore operations for developing mobile value-added services (VAS) applications which can be delivered over service-oriented architectures (SOAs) to clients.
The CoE and competence centre is planned to employ over a 100 people who will develop intelligent network applications and service delivery platforms, besides building customised SOA architectures for content delivery and management.
Aricent is seeing strong demand from telecom operators for its software solutions, and the new mobile VAS centre is expected to provide design and content management support its product development teams.
The centre will focus on systems design and integration, testing and post-integration troubleshooting for clients. It will collaborate with business groups within Aricent to drive customer projects requiring SOA design and the development of J2EE applications. Repeated calls to Aricent on their India plans were not returned.
Aricent is the successor to Hughes Software Systems, established in 1991, as well as Flextronics Software Systems, which was created in 2001 after the parent company’s acquisition. The company is reportedly in the process of increasing people-count at its Bangalore and Chennai centres by about 1,000 people to meet the demand from telecom service providers for new products and services.
Palo Alto, California-headquartered Aricent’s list of over 550 customers worldwide includes Bharti Airtel, Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Motorola, Samsung, LG, Siemens, Sony Ericsson, Vodafone, Virgin Mobile and Texas Instruments. The company’s investors include Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR), Sequoia Capital, The Family Office and The Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board.
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In 2006, Flextronics sold 85 per cent stake in the company for $900 million — the largest leveraged buyout in India at that point of time — to KKR and Sequoia Capital. Flextronics sold additional stake to Family Office in 2008.
Aricent combines the leading innovation capabilities of frog design (acquired by Flextronics in 2004) with domain expertise in communications as a strategic supplier to the world’s foremost infrastructure, application and service providers.
Its products and services span the entire communications ecosystem including user experience design, consulting, research and development, testing and integration for devices and infrastructure, besides operational and billing systems.