It took nine months--a nice round figure for a full-term pregnancy but a little longer than anticipated for Syniverse Technologies to close its acquisition of Billing Services Group’s wireless business. The companies closed their transaction yesterday and will hold an analyst conference on Jan. 15, but Syniverse President and Chief Executive Officer Tony Holcombe spoke with Telephony’s Tim McElligott about the path ahead. He even chimed in on the fate of VeriSign.

On the drivers for this acquisition: The main reason for buying CSG is, at one level, they are in same market we are and offer data clearinghouse services to the same operators we do, so combining our services will give us about 500 wireless customers in about 100 countries. That gives us a real strong global presence, which we have been working hard for over the last couple of years. Our global revenue will now be about 33% from outside North America.

We also get a great high-quality technology team out of Germany. Integrating them with our team in Tampa will give us not only a solid platform but a pretty substantial cost savings. We told Wall Street we’re looking at $12 million in annual cost savings by combining the two platforms. That will probably take a couple of years to do.

Wireless operators today are demanding lower prices as they consolidate. So our ability to drive our cost down makes us more competitive. They have a great product that we don’t have: a financial clearinghouse. That’s the last step of the clearing process for billing and rate charging. We’ll now have the money deposited with us. We will do the settlement of funds between carriers. This is going to be a more important service over time because carriers are looking for financial and data clearinghouse platforms. We think BSG’s financial clearing solution is the best in the business.

On why it took so long to close: We thought we would get through a Phase 1 review from the [European Commission]. We didn’t think it was a competitive threat issue, so we were a little surprised that the EC guys wanted to go to a Phase 2 review. Also, we got caught up in [Europe’s] holiday season in August. At the end of the day, they came back and gave us a full pass. They didn’t ask for any changes or covenants.

On Wall Street’s reaction: We have not gone to Wall Street yet to talk about 2008. We haven’t gone into a lot of detail on the acquisition other than the $12 million run rate of savings. So they haven’t seen the full impact yet. We’ll probably go to the street in the early part of 2008. But they are happy that we continue to hit our numbers. We exceeded our numbers for Q1, Q2 and Q3, so they see positive momentum. Plus, it was a good price we paid given the saving we can wring out of it.

On saying good riddance to VeriSign as a player in telecom: Yes, we were glad to see them go. They were very disruptive on price. Even our number-one competitor, MACH, would probably agree with us on that. We didn’t think VeriSign’s model was ultimately economically sustainable, and that turned out to be the case. What happens now? Who knows? Who buys what assets is something we are keenly interested in. We got an irrational player out of the market. MACH is very rational and professional; we are rational and professional. Long term, I think it is good for everyone, including the carriers. VeriSign had a business model that didn’t work It blew up, and now they are getting out.

On picking up some of their assets: They have a small piece of roaming and clearing. Obviously, we are interested in that. They do messaging, interoperability services and SMS and MMS. They have an SS7 network as we do, and the cost efficiencies of putting those together would be enormous, so we would certainly be interested in that. We are not particularly interested in their billing component. They also bought a slough of content and third-party intermediary businesses. We didn’t like that model then and still don’t like it. What we don’t know is how those services will be marketed or how they would dispose of them. We will take a hard look at the assets we think provide value to the shareholders and from our customers’ perspective.