Amdocs had a good week; how was yours?

Amdocs, a provider of software and services to enable integrated customer management, announced on Friday the signing of an agreement to acquire Cramer Systems Group Ltd, an operations support systems solutions provider. Under the terms of the agreement, Amdocs gets all of Cramer’s shares of capital stock for approximately US $375 million in cash.

Completion of the acquisition is subject to regulatory approval and other closing conditions customary to such transactions and is expected to occur in the current fiscal quarter. The transaction is expected to be approximately US $0.04 dilutive to non-GAAP earnings per share in fiscal 2007 and then accretive thereafter. With the acquisition, Amdocs seeks to expand its service management and OSS offerings and expects to become a leader in OSS.

Cramer’s product repertoire includes OSS product portfolio, including products in network resource management, activation and auto discovery. Amdocs can now claim to be the only company to deliver an end-to-end solution spanning OSS and customer-facing business support systems such as billing and customer relationship management.

Amdocs Management Limited chief executive officer Dov Baharav proclaimed that “Together, we intend to deliver a complete automated service fulfillment solution across all lines of business – for any service, on any network.” Cramer will form a new division in Amdocs to be the centerpiece of Amdocs’ OSS strategy and activities and will leverage Amdocs assets in BSS and OSS. Amdocs has promised to keep Cramer’s current management in charge of Cramer business.

The announcement came on the heels of Amdocs’ release of some earning statistics from the third quarter of fiscal year 2006. Third quarter revenue for Amdocs grew 23 percent, up to US $626 million, and a 32 percent increase in third quarter diluted non-GAAP EPS, excluding acquisition-related costs and equity-based compensation expense, to US $0.49. The forecast released by Amdocs for the quarter had EPS at US $0.46.

Free cash flow for the quarter was US $94 million. The revenue figures represent a new high in Amdocs income. Along with the figures came guidance forecasting for the current quarter. Expected revenue for Amdocs will be approximately US $657 million and diluted non-GAAP EPS of US $0.49. Diluted GAAP EPS is expected to be approximately US $0.41, mostly due to acquisition fees.

For fiscal year 2007, Amdocs experts expected revenue of approximately $2.885 billion US with diluted non-GAAP EPS in the US $2.11 ballpark. “We are confident that our success in 2006 will continue as we look towards fiscal 2007,” said Baharav. Amdocs’ third quarter was highlighted by eleven key wins and a few other memorable moments credited by Amdocs brain trust for the company’s nice three-month run.

Amdocs expanded its relationship with Rogers Communications, which will install Amdocs CRM across its cable, wireless and telecom lines of business. Australia-based Telstra selected Amdocs a key vendor for their OSS transformational program. In the United States, Amdocs was awarded several projects related to assisting customers in their consolidation and integration of acquisitions.

And there is, of course, the Cramer acquisition… Amdocs is a software and services provider that seeks to accelerate implementation of integrated customer management by the world’s leading service providers. Amdocs boasted revenue of more than US $2 billion in fiscal 2005 and has 13,000 employees in fifty-one countries around the world. Cramer is a provider of operational support system software for the telecom industry.

Among Cramer solutions users are Bell Canada, KPN, TDC, Telefonica, TeliaSonera and Vodafone. Cramer has partnerships with industry heavyweights such as Accenture, Alcatel, Ericsson, HP, IBM, Oracle and SAP.