IBM acquires Vallent

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1. What are you announcing today?
A. IBM today announced that it has completed its acquisition of Vallent Corporation, a privately held company based in Bellevue, WA. IBM announced its intention to buy Vallent on November 28, 2006. Vallent’s operations will be integrated into IBM’s Tivoli Software business unit.

2. What is Vallent?
A. Vallent is a privately-held software company with more than 200 communications service provider customers worldwide. Vallent has a particularly strong customer base of wireless service providers, and has business partner relationships with many of the world’s leading network equipment providers.

3. What technology does Vallent provide?
A. Vallent provides complementary network and service management software, including network performance monitoring and service quality management, which helps service providers monitor and report on the health of their networks, measure the quality of their customers’ experiences, and manage their networked infrastructure in the context of the associated services, customers, and business goals. Vallent’s technology is particularly well-suited for helping mobile telecommunications carriers manage their critical radio access networks (RAN).

4. What is creating the need for Vallent’s technology?
A. Communications service providers operate in a rapidly changing, competitive marketplace. To compete, service providers must reduce costs, speed time to market for new services such as IPTV and mobile gaming, and ensure high service quality. As carriers deploy service delivery platforms (SDP), IP Multimedia Subsystems (IMS), and deliver fixed/mobile convergence in pursuit of these goals, the complexity involved in managing the infrastructure and the services it carries increases significantly. Vallent’s technology helps service providers understand network health and the quality of each customer’s experience across large, complex, multi-technology, multi-vendor environments. With this insight, service providers can confidently roll out new services delivered at a high level of quality while running an efficient operation.

5. How will Vallent technology be integrated into your software portfolio?
A. IBM will integrate Vallent into IBM Software Group as a part of its Tivoli Software unit, the same unit into which the Netcool assets from IBM’s acquisition of Micromuse have been integrated. Product integration plans are available from your current IBM or Vallent sales representative.

6. Do Vallent’s products overlap with what IBM Tivoli provides today?
A. Vallent’s approach to developing middleware is very compatible with IBM’s. Vallent’s products are complementary to current Tivoli Software offerings and will introduce significant new functionality to the current portfolio. We see tremendous potential for integrating Vallent’s portfolio with Netcool and the Tivoli Software suite. Vallent’s depth of capabilities to manage wireless radio access networks (RAN) are particularly complementary to, and expected to fit well with, Netcool’s depth of capabilities to manage wireline infrastructure and IP-based services.

Furthermore, Vallent is expected to extend IBM’s ability to help service providers create, integrate, and manage next generation IP services, by complementing IBM’s existing portfolio of software, professional services, and systems hardware.

7. How does this support IBM’s aim to broaden service management beyond traditional IT to include network operations and revenue-generating assets?
A. Vallent complements IBM Service Management with deep capabilities focused on the wireless radio access network (RAN), a critical infrastructure supporting the services that wireless service providers deliver to their customers. IBM Service Management offers a complete picture spanning the critical assets that a business relies upon to deliver services to their customers. With Vallent a part of the portfolio, IBM Service Management enables carriers to provide service information to teams such as network operations, engineering, marketing, customer care, billing and other service stakeholders that need to know how a service is performing, who is affected by service issues, and service level agreement (SLA) performance.