Telecom Italia, Australia’s Telstra and Japan’s SoftBank Win Fourth Annual Comverse Innovation Awards

Telecom Italia, Telstra and SoftBank were selected as winners of the fourth annual Comverse Innovation Awards, which were presented at Comverse EXPO, an online virtual event with interactive webinars and demos showcasing innovations and trends within the telecommunications industry.

More than 3,000 people from 95 countries attended last week’s kickoff of Comverse EXPO, which runs throughout 2009.

"The Comverse EXPO is a ground-breaking way to share significant new information about our products and industry developments with people around the globe,” said Andre Dahan, President and CEO of Comverse, who opened the first annual event.

"Besides interacting live with industry thought leaders,” Dahan said, "attendees can view webinars, learn about the latest developments from our Innovations Lab, and watch compelling online demos that showcase Comverse’s breadth of expertise in telecom’s most exciting areas, such as billing, mobile advertising, visual voicemail, converged messaging and IP communications.”

The opening day of the Comverse EXPO featured webinars about industry trends; challenges facing telecom operators; and how to improve the telecom consumer’s overall experience with more robust billing and customer management systems. All webinars, which were led by Comverse executives and telecom industry analysts, are archived for viewing at http://www.comverse-expo.com/virtual/.

The second day featured presentations about this year’s Comverse Innovation Awards in each of the company’s focus areas. Organized in association with independent technology research and consulting firm Yankee Group, the awards honor exceptional achievements of service providers that have creatively implemented a Comverse solution to achieve significant business success.

This year’s award winners are:

Telecom Italia (Billing and Active Customer Management): Replaced multiple billing systems and custom-built components with the robust core functionality of Comverse’s postpaid billing solution. The operator’s vision is to fully converge its services, such as wireline, mobile, IP, voice, data and content, with a single converged view of the customer to gain monetization versatility, optimal operational and cost efficiency, and fast rollout of converged products and services. The final data migration, consisting of 22 million accounts in 15 distributed customer databases, was accomplished in a single 48-hour period with Comverse Global Services acting as the primary contractor.

"Comverse has the best in-class, market leading billing system that supports all of Telecom Italia’s business and IT needs,” said Mirco Tozzi, Program Director, Billing Unico Project for Telecom Italia.

Telstra of Australia (Value-Added Services): Telstra’s online integrated inbox uses Comverse Messaging Gateway to give users unified access to and storage for messages from mobile, fixed and Internet sources -- voicemail, videomail, email, text (SMS) and multimedia (MMS) -- for a seamless and consistent converged messaging experience.

"This breakthrough project positions Telstra as Australia’s first telecom company to offer its subscribers a seamless and consistent messaging experience across all devices and all platforms in a unified approach,” said Anna Barton, General Manager, Messaging Services for Telstra.

SoftBank Mobile Corporation of Japan (IP Communications): Captured the award for their Converged IP Centrex solution, enabling businesses for the first time to reduce costs and increase productivity by extending their PBX-based telephony services to employees on the move. The SIP-based platform enables such advanced features as short dialling, call transfer, call hold, call hunting and more – all from SoftBank 3G phones anywhere, creating a transparent user experience.

"Comverse’s annual Innovation Awards enable us to give tribute to operators who, in the face of today’s great challenges, leverage Comverse’s wide range of services to go beyond commonly accepted boundaries,” said Urban Gillstrom, Group President of Global Sales at Comverse. "Extending currently accepted limits of performance makes it possible to seize opportunities to tap into new sources of revenue and capture a leading role in the changing ecosystem.”

The Comverse EXPO was conducted in cooperation with the Yankee Group, Ovum, Strategy Analytics, Forrester Research, Frost & Sullivan, and Telecom TV and its corporate sponsors include IBM, Sun Microsystems, EMC², and HP.

To register for upcoming Comverse EXPO webinars throughout 2009 and to experience innovations, demos and more in the Exhibition Hall, please visit http://www.comverse-expo.com/.

About Comverse

Comverse is the world’s leading provider of software and systems enabling value-added services for voice, messaging, mobile Internet and mobile advertising; converged billing and active customer management; and IP communications. Comverse’s extensive customer base spans more than 130 countries and covers over 500 communication service providers serving more than two billion subscribers. The company’s innovative product portfolio enables communication service providers to unleash the value of the network for their customers by making their networks smarter. Comverse’s solutions support flexible deployment models, including in-network, hosted and managed services, and can run on circuit-switched, IP, IMS or converged network environments. Comverse is a subsidiary of Comverse Technology, Inc. (CMVT.PK). For more information, visit www.comverse.com.

All product and company names mentioned herein may be registered trademarks or trademarks of Comverse or the respective referenced company(s).

This release contains "forward-looking statements” under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 that involve risks and uncertainties. There can be no assurances that any forward-looking statements will be achieved. Important factors that could affect the statements contained herein include: changes in the demand for the company’s products; changes in capital spending among the company’s current and prospective customers; the risks associated with the sale of large, complex, high capacity systems and with new product introductions as well as the uncertainty of customer acceptance of these new or enhanced products from either the company or its competition; and risks associated with rapidly changing technology and the ability of the company to introduce new products on a timely and cost-effective basis. The company undertakes no commitment to update or revise forward-looking statements except as required by law.