Camiant had begun to get traction with wireless companies long before Tekelec bought it (along with Camiant partner Blueslice) in mid-May.

Randy Fuller, director of business planning at Tekelec, formerly the VP of business development at Camiant, can’t repeat frequently enough how happy Camiant is to be part of a global company. Given the way the mobile business is expanding in international markets, that’s understandable.

The combination of the three companies – Tekelec, Camiant and Blueslice – “lets us do something we couldn’t before,” he explained, which is to combine a subscriber management database with policy control.

In mobile, there’s tremendous complexity in keeping track of what subscriber has signed up for which calling plan and which features. Layer on the introduction of usage billing, and the ability to marry the subscriber database (Blueslice) with policy control (Camiant) and performance monitoring (Tekelec) becomes a very powerful means of managing a wireless business.

Camiant and Blueslice had touted their interoperability long before Tekelec bought the two of them.

AT&T is moving to usage billing, and Verizon has been talking about doing likewise. Time Warner Cable tried it but had to back off.

Though TWC hasn’t reinstituted usage billing, it still believes that’s the way the market has to go and has publicly supported AT&T’s move.

“If cable goes to a usage model, the same product set can do the same thing on the cable side,” Fuller said. “We started with cable, and now we’re in mobile, but we can take our ideas back to cable.”

Nothing on the product roadmap yet, but Fuller noted that Tekelec has expertise in SIP, and “we’re looking at how we can use that in PacketCable.”