Customer experience systems vendor Amdocs, has announced the acquisition of jNetX (News - Alert), a privately-held service delivery platform provider, for $50 million net of debt and cash, subject to post closing adjustments. 

Amdocs (News - Alert) officials say the acquisition "accelerates" their position in the SDP market, since it combines jNetX's offering with Amdocs' CE products and service delivery. 

The SDP market is estimated to grow at a 14 percent to $6 billion by 2013, according to industry analyst firm Analysys (News - Alert) Mason in a study concluded a couple months ago. It's seen as a way of "enabling faster time-to-market and the monetization of services."

Amdocs and jNetX share a number of customers, including Vodafone (News - Alert) Group, British Telecom and Mobilkom.

In explaining the market opportunity they see, Amdocs officials contend that "today," service providers "are seeking to move their businesses from predominantly subscription-based access services to include rich content, applications, and other offerings." Therefore, the combination of Amdocs and jNetX products will, in their view, "allow service providers to expose both Telecom and IP components in the network to offer convergent network, IT and Web-based services."

A couple weeks ago, TMC had the news that Amdocs announced that Codetel, a wholly-owned subsidiary of America Movil, deployed Amdocs CES (News - Alert) for convergent wireline, wireless, broadband and IPTV billing, ordering and customer relationship management.

Amdocs is evidently hoping to distance themselves from other SDP vendors supporting services solely on IP-based networks: Jim Liang, senior vice president strategy and corporate development for Amdocs, underlined the "technological combination" of the acquisition.

The combination is also an excuse for punching up Amdocs CES Portfolio. The vendor has enhanced their convergent charging offering by providing service control and service brokering capabilities, and are touting "closer integration with the Amdocs App Store to expose network services to developers."

Amdocs does not expect a material impact from the acquisition of jNetX on fiscal year 2010 non-GAAP earnings per share, which excludes acquisition related costs and equity-based compensation expense, net of related tax effects. The impact on GAAP results will be finalized after Amdocs completes the purchase price accounting for the acquisition.