'Parse a Service Center Time Stamp (SCTS) string into a Python datetime
object, or None if the timestamp couldn\'t be parsed. The SCTS format does
not seem to be standardized, but looks something like: YY/MM/DD,HH:MM:SS.'

def _parse_incoming_timestamp(self, timestamp):

    tz_pattern = '([-+])(\\d+)$'
    m = re.search(tz_pattern, timestamp)
    if (m is not None):
        timestamp = re.sub(tz_pattern, '', timestamp)
        tz_offset = datetime.timedelta(minutes=(int(m.group(2)) * 15))
        if (m.group(1) == '-'):
            tz_offset = (- tz_offset)
    else:
        tz_offset = datetime.timedelta()
    try:
        time_struct = time.strptime(timestamp, self.SCTS_FMT)
        dt = datetime.datetime(*time_struct[:6])
        dt.replace(tzinfo=pytz.utc)
        dt -= tz_offset
        return dt
    except ValueError:
        traceback.print_exc()
        return None
