CINCINNATI-Sprint Nextel Corp. said it plans to phase out its billing relationship with Convergys Corp. and has signed a preliminary agreement with Amdocs Ltd. for a single billing and customer care platform to serve all of its wireless subscribers.
Plans call for Sprint Nextel to migrate subscribers off its legacy Precedent 2000 system this year and next year. Conversion to the Amdocs system is expected to begin once a definitive service agreement between Sprint Nextel and Amdocs is reached. The proposed agreement with Amdocs would cover eight years.
“We have selected Amdocs to support Sprint Nextel because of its extensive experience in the industry and their ability to adapt to our customers’ changing needs, and the company’s growing portfolio of products and services,” said Dick LeFave, chief information officer for Sprint Nextel.
Sprint spokesperson Sara Krueger said the carrier would alert its customers about any changes in its billing system, if such changes occur. Although she declined to give details on how Amdocs was selected, Krueger said that the evaluation process was “very thorough.” She described the vendor switch as just another step in the integration of Sprint and Nextel.
Convergys began supporting Sprint Corp.’s wireless billing needs at the carrier’s inception in 1996, while Nextel Communications Inc. deployed Amdocs’ billing and customer care services beginning in 2000. Sprint acquired Nextel in August.
Convergys noted that the Sprint Nextel contract contributed about $100 million in revenue to its Information Management Group last year. Convergys reiterated its 2006 earnings guidance of $1.07 per share or more despite the loss of the Sprint Nextel business.
In a separate agreement, Sprint also has decided to extend its relationship with EDS, which has provided the company with IT services including help desk support, local area network support, hardware reseller services and management of Sprint’s midrange computing for the past four years, and application development and maintenance support for the last two years. EDS had provided Nextel with call center support for its Blackberry service as well.
The contract extension includes midrange hosting, storage, premise data network support and hardware purchases.
