Ericsson accelerates its professional services engine

In a single stroke, Ericsson has expanded its professional services capabilities by acquiring Pride Spa, an Italian consulting and systems integration company.

With the Pride Spa acquisition, Ericsson adds 1,000 systems integration employees to its Professional Service staff. Ericsson, which has dominated the telecom professional services market segment, will now have 40,000 professional services staff on hand.

Ericsson expects to close the deal in February, but wouldn't reveal any financial details of the deal other than saying in a LightReading Europe article that the acquisition will have an "immaterial but positive" effect on its own earnings. As of 2008, Pride reported $174 million in revenues.

The one thing that is clear about the Spa acquisition is that it comes with a host of landline and wireless customers, including Telecom Italia Spa, 3 Italia, Vodafone Italy and Fastweb SpA. In addition, Pride Spa boasts vendor partnerships with Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Nokia Siemens Networks and even Ericsson.

While Ericsson has seen its traditional equipment business continue to decline at the hands of aggressive competitors such as Huawei and ZTE, professional services is a business that continues to thrive [1] for the Swedish vendor.

Building up its professional services business through acquring other firms has been an ongoing trend for Ericsson. Since 2004, Ericsson has acquired five professional services companies, including Turkish-based Bizitek last May.

For more:
- see the release here [2]
- LightReading has this article [3]

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