Acision

» see acision.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Every text message you have ever sent went into a piece of software called a short message service center, which held it until the network could work out where the recipient was and deliver it. Somebody wrote that software. For a large share of the world's operators between 2007 and 2015, that somebody was a company in Reading called Acision, and almost nobody who sent a text ever heard the name.

It was assembled rather than founded. LogicaCMG sold its telecom products division in 2007 for 265 million pounds to a buyer group of Atlantic Bridge and Len Blavatnik's Access Industries, and the carved-out business came out with about 1,700 staff in twenty-two countries and more than 300 clients already on the books. Acision Limited was registered in the UK on 22 May 2007 and the old operating company, LogicaCMG Wireless Networks, took the new name that July.

The lineage underneath it is older than the brand by fourteen years. Aldiscon, a Dublin firm Logica bought in 1997, is credited with the first commercial short message service center, running for Telia in Sweden in 1993, and CMG's wireless data people were building the same thing in the Netherlands in roughly the same window. The two claims overlap and the companies that could have settled it have all been renamed since.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ store and forward ~

A message center is a post office with a queue. The phone hands the message up, the center stores it, and if the other handset is off or out of coverage the message waits, sometimes for hours, then arrives at an awkward moment. Every delayed birthday text of the 2000s was a store-and-forward decision made by software like this.

Acision claimed more than half the world's SMS revenue passed through its platforms, which is a company's own number and was never audited in public. What is documented is less flattering and more interesting: revenue of 190.6 million dollars in 2014, for a business sitting underneath a service that carriers were still billing per message while people moved to apps that charged nothing. Selling the picks to a gold rush is a fine position until the miners leave.

In Turkey that shift showed up on the phone bill. Texting through the 2000s was a counted thing, bundled and rationed by the month, and within a few years the traffic had moved to data and the counting stopped meaning much. The software kept running underneath all of it.

~ a line in the register ~

Comverse agreed to buy Acision on 15 June 2015 for 135 million dollars in cash plus 3.13 million shares, with up to 35 million more tied to milestones. The deal closed on 6 August. In the filing that followed, the buyer booked the whole thing at a preliminary 237.7 million dollars, which is the number to use when the press reports disagree, and they do.

Then the branding went through in stages, and the paperwork dates it precisely. Comverse itself became Xura on 9 September 2015. Acision Global Limited was renamed Xura Global Limited on 23 October. Acision Limited became Xura Limited on 5 November 2015, and that is the day the name stopped belonging to anything. Both companies were renamed again on 28 February 2017, to Mavenir, and the original entity was dissolved on 3 September 2019.

acision.com still answers. It sends you to mavenir.com, two renames downstream from the company that bought it, and nothing on the page acknowledges that a messaging business named Acision ever existed.

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