Buried in the New York Times story about Microsoft’s venture investments in Europe, a juicy nugget:
Ericsson, the Stockholm-based mobile network company, said today that it would buy Netwise, a Swedish developer of Internet phone software, for 300 million kronor, or $42.3 million.
What do you guys make of this acquisition? Good, Bad and perhaps Why?
Om, as I was asking your guest substitute some days ago… I think bridging the gap between hard infrastructure (baby bell, clec, or phone mfg) and VoIP services is a no brainer. They’re gonna have to go that way or get creamed. So, why not do this now?
Once an AT&T or a Verizon gets into the oIP game does the regulation come with along with them for the ride? Said another way… can they dodge regulatory oversight by diving into oIP services?
That alone would signify a huge uptick it would seem to me. Of course, if that was really the case they’d be there now… wouldn’t they?
Being part of a direct competitor of ///, I have to say that from our point of view, it is not so reassuring. Though on a more broad view, the telecommunication sector (apart from the handset word) is in total consolidation. As you mentionned Nokia with Marconi but also AlcaCent (ALCATEL LUCENT) are the big consolidation. But so many smaller consolidations are also happening under the radar (Cisco, Alcatel, Huawei…) when the big guys pay a big price for a small niche company.
The landscape of the TelCo world is about to change drastically not only for pure technical reasons (3G/Wimax/IPTV..) but also for economical reasons (price pressure from operators, scale economy, market share…)
In 2 words, today wont be tomorrow and tomorrow is another day 🙂
Indifference. Netwise started out as a developer of auto-attendant and call/presence management systems for traditional pbx systems and then migrated into IP based products. Their mobile-pbx integration is somewhat interesting though. Until recently the company did not have any sales traction outside local markets. The real story is that Ericsson has not had anything to offer in the enterprise IP pbx area and until recently did not seem to have much direction. Here is the company they should have bought instead: http://www.advoco.se/.