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April 12, 2006
Back to the Future: Consolidation of the VoIP Industry is Underway..Again
From late 1997 through early 1999 fifty two companies that had exhibited at our VON events became four. Back then it was the likes of: Cisco, Lucent, Ericsson and Nortel that were responsible for the bulk of the acquisitions.
Fast forward to the Spring of 2006, perform a search and replace on the companies doing the acquiring and it is feeling a lot like 1998 all over again.
Just for the record, it isn't much of a surprise to me that "Merger Mania Hits VoIP." During the past year, the team at pulvermedia has witnessed an increasingly growing number of private company consolidations and acquisitions as they were selling companies into our worldwide VON events. But now that the buyers are higher profile companies, it is starting to get the attention of the mainstream business media. As Om correctly points out, "the reality is that small fortunes are being made (and lost) in the boring sometimes mind-numbing under the hood stuff, that is called real technology."
It turns out that now happens to be a great time to be an investment banker / lawyer who has ties into the VoIP industry. 2006 should be a great year for generating fees from companies in the VoIP industry. This is in addition to the fees to be earned by the growing pipeline of private companies waiting/hoping/wishing to go public.
The biggest difference between 1997-1999 and today is that back then for every company that was acquired, there were three or four new Voice over IP focused startups that popped up. At the moment, while I'm aware of quite a number of early-stage start-ups that were formed in the past year, the core focus of these companies is not about Voice over IP but rather about other related technologies in IP Communications space with a strong focus on video.
Tags: voip, von, Jeff Pulver
(c) 2006 Jeff Pulver. All Rights Reserved.
(This blog posting is copyright protected by Jeff Pulver. Portions of this blog posting may be quoted or abstracted if attributed.)
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Posted by jeff on April 12, 2006 09:11 AM | Permalink
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Comments
About the topic "Merger Mania Hits VoIP" by OM and "Skype Makes A Buy-Sonorit" by Andy:
this is Skype / eBay move in the right direction to complete with Microsoft, Google, AOL and Yahoo, as also Andy points out (but forgets Google is which one that is a very strong technology company and top eBay competitor), Skype core biz is voice and it cannot afford to depend on the 3rd party license, but must own the core voice technology, as Microsoft does.
However Sonorit/Camino is too small (less then 10 people), was formed as a company just several months ago, has no shipping product, has no single customer, so this acquisition does not solve Skype technology hole yet.
This acquisition is not to avoid paying royalties to GIPS, this is strategic Skype technology move to compete with Microsoft, Google, AOL and Yahoo, there are several clear less costy ways for Skype to stop paying royalties to GIPS, and GIPS legal suite has no strong base.
Following Skype acquisition by eBay in September, this acquisition validates again high market prices for software voice technology companies, like Skype, GIPS, Camino and SPIRIT.
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Posted by: Valentina at May 9, 2006 02:36 PM
About the topic "Merger Mania Hits VoIP" by OM and "Skype Makes A Buy-Sonorit" by Andy:
this is Skype / eBay move in the right direction to complete with Microsoft, Google, AOL and Yahoo, as also Andy points out (but forgets Google is which one that is a very strong technology company and top eBay competitor), Skype core biz is voice and it cannot afford to depend on the 3rd party license, but must own the core voice technology, as Microsoft does.
However Sonorit/Camino is too small (less then 10 people), was formed as a company just several months ago, has no shipping product, has no single customer, so this acquisition does not solve Skype technology hole yet.
This acquisition is not to avoid paying royalties to GIPS, this is strategic Skype technology move to compete with Microsoft, Google, AOL and Yahoo, there are several clear less costy ways for Skype to stop paying royalties to GIPS, and GIPS legal suite has no strong base.
Following Skype acquisition by eBay in September, this acquisition validates again high market prices for software voice technology companies, like Skype, GIPS, Camino and SPIRIT.
Posted by: Valentina at April 13, 2006 07:48 AM