Nokia today announced its intention to acquire the network operations support system (OSS) specialist Comptel as part of its increased focus on software. Nokia will pay €347 million ($370 million) in cash for Comptel.

Both Nokia and Comptel are headquartered in Finland, and they’ve worked together for years.

The OSS company will support Nokia’s new standalone software business unit, which Nokia President and CEO Rajeev Suri announced in November 2016 at Nokia’s Capital Markets Day event in Barcelona, Spain.

Comptel would bolster Nokia's portfolio by adding software for catalog-driven network service orchestration and fulfillment. Comptel's service orchestration portfolio would be combined with Nokia's existing service assurance portfolio.

Josh Aroner, Nokia’s head of applications and analytics marketing, said on a media call this morning, “This adds an important and critical solution around catalog-driven orchestration and fulfillment and service monetization. It gives us mediation capabilities that complement BSS and OSS portfolios.”

Nokia says the beefed-up OSS capabilities from Comptel when combined with Nokia's Cloudband and Nuage portfolios, will enable it to provide customers with complete, end-to-end orchestration of complex network functions virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN) deployments. The Comptel assets also help service providers to assure digital services across physical, virtual, and hybrid networks.

Companies such as Comptel, Amdocs, Netcracker, and Radcom have traditionally provided back-office support systems for telcos. They now must work with their service provider customers to help them transition to NFV and SDN.

For its part, Amdocs is working with AT&T on its ECOMP project, contributing three modules to ECOMP.

Nokia is just completing the integration of Alcatel-Lucent, which it bought last year for $17.7 billion. During Nokia’s fourth quarter 2016 earnings call this month, Suri said he was disappointed with the company’s revenues in 2016, but he expected performance to improve in 2017. The Alcatel-Lucent IP networking assets help diversify Nokia’s portfolio, which was historically focused on mobile networks.

Comptel is a public company that trades on the Helsinki Nasdaq. It employs about 800 people in more than 30 countries. Nokia is making a tender offer for the company at a premium of around 29 percent, possibly to discourage competing offers.

SDxCentral Editor-in-Chief Sue Marek contributed to this report.