Amdocs and Openet settle baffling, endless patent dispute

After eight years of ensuring expensive holidays for their lawyers, rival telecoms software companies Amdocs and Openet have decided to call it a draw.

An extremely short announcement from Amdocs said “Amdocs and Openet today announced that they have settled a patent infringement dispute in the United States Federal District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.  As part of the confidential settlement, Amdocs agreed to license certain patents to Openet.”

Back in 2010 youthful Light Reading hack Ray Le Maistre spoke to (then and still) Openet CEO Niall Norton in a bid to find out what Amdocs’ problem was. Norton, however, seemed to be as baffled as everyone else by this act of unilateral legal aggression and chose to conclude that it was merely a measure of how intimidated Amdocs was by the plucky Irish BSS upstart.

“[Amdocs] is a good company and a ferocious competitor,” said Norton at the time. “It’s good to know they’re thinking about us as much as we’re thinking about them. We’re open-minded about what might happen next. Our lawyers say this could take anything between three and 12 months to sort out.”

That’s what they always say Niall and then, before you know it, eight years have gone past and they’re the only ones with any cash. To be fair the case does seem to be especially arcane. A spot of light Googling revealed one case that was apparently resolved in 2016 and another that came to a conclusion a month or so ago. Both accounts seem like very effective cures for insomnia but we don’t feel any more enlightened about the merits and outcome of this litigatiathon as a result of enduring them.

In essence Amdocs accused Openet of infringing on some of its patents and the fact that Openet is now going to shell out some license fees would seem to vindicate it to some degree. But if we assume Amdocs’ intention was at the very least to force Openet to entirely abandon the technology in question, and maybe even to force it out of business, then the case seems to have been a failure.