WALLDORF, Germany, and NICE, France - May 06, 2009 - Recognizing that communication service providers, including voice, data, content and mobility companies, today are obliged to offer more innovative and value-based services, SAP AG (NYSE: SAP), the world’s leading provider of business software, announced that the signing of the acquisition of privately-held Highdeal, the leading provider of real-time billing solutions for telecommunications, occurred on May 4, 2009. Highdeal delivers sophisticated pricing and charging solutions designed to support today’s new service economy. To survive in the present economy, communication service providers must collaborate seamlessly with partners to introduce innovative new services more rapidly and cost effectively. The combination of SAP and Highdeal is intended to provide customers a packaged consume-to-cash business process platform to support high-volume billing and enable a reduction in cost of ownership. This announcement was made at the TMForum Management World 2009 conference being held in Nice, France, May 4-8.
Headquartered in Caen, France, Highdeal has more than 200 customer implementations in over 50 countries. As a spin-off from the research and development labs of France Telecom in 2000, Highdeal pioneered the pricing and rating market, gaining early prominence in the telecommunications industry. Given the similar business models shared by telecommunications and industries with emerging business-to-consumer billing requirements, Highdeal has developed a growing list of clients in utilities, media, financial services, high tech, and transportation and logistics. Highdeal employs approximately 90 employees, located around the world in major cities including Paris, New York, London, Miami and Singapore. The acquisition of Highdeal is consistent with SAP’s strategy to complement existing solutions with purchases of innovative technologies and capabilities.
“As business models change, communication service providers’ billing systems are rapidly becoming inadequate and not cost-effective,” said Bob Stutz, corporate officer and member of the Executive Council, SAP AG. “By integrating Highdeal’s next-generation rating and charging solution with SAP’s leading billing solutions, SAP plans to deliver a robust, event-driven solution to manage the complete consume-to-cash process across business networks. I welcome the Highdeal team to SAP.”
In keeping with SAP’s strategy to enable business model innovation through co-innovation, SAP plans to offer customers a fully integrated solution to enable them to seamlessly offer and support new business models to drive growth. Building upon its existing billing functionality, SAP intends to support a full array of real-time rating and charging requirements
“The Highdeal vision has been to provide our customers with breakthrough technology to support flexibility to enable dynamic business models,” said Eric Pillevesse, CEO and co-founder of Highdeal. “The Highdeal team is excited to join SAP. Together we will innovate and bring our unified solutions to more companies.”
SAP anticipates that the acquisition will be completed by June 2009 and will provide additional details about the integration of the companies after the closing of the transaction. Terms and the purchase price are not disclosed publicly.