When hosted VoIP deployment was not so hip and switch replacement was in, vendors like Taqua and MetaSwitch were in the driving seat. Taqua, the leader in the pack, had revenue rate of around $8 million per quarter. That was around year 2003. Then companies like Softbank BB and Vonage lit the match in the other quarter and service providers started running blind towards hosted VoIP.
When in 2004 Tekelec acquired Taqua, the nextgen Class 5 product startup was managing turnover of around $6 million per quarter. By late 2006 that had gone down to around $2 million per quarter under Tekelec’s ownership.
There seem to be two main reasons for revenue decline: (1) service provider shift in focus from switch replacement to hosted VoIP, and (2) an acquisition gone wrong.
The Taqua sales team probably ended up selling the whole NGN portfolio acquired by Tekelec (which included Santera and Vocaldata assets as well) including the signaling products of the company. The team perhaps found it easier to sell just the signaling product rather than the NGN portfolio since NGN was a competitive space compared to the signaling area which Tekelec dominated.
As Taqua product was being sidelined, the IOC market fell in the lap of MetaSwitch who became the market leader in the integrated Class 5 switch segment.
When Genband acquired Tekelec’s nextgen switch business, it decided not to promote the acquired softswitch assets. Genband’s focus is applications and gateways. The company has OEM partnerships with softswitch vendors and did not want to compete with its partners. At that point the Genband management convinced Charlie Vogt (the present as well as the past CEO of Taqua) to buy out the division. That all happened in June 2007. Genband has no investment in Taqua.
If the new independent Taqua is able achieve just half of what it did in terms of revenues in 2004, we are told that the company will be profitable. The re-born entity has conservative business plans to start with. However is has a good base to restart from. Taqua has around 300 Class 5 switches deployed in North America. It carries out replacement (not augmentation) of legacy switches. After replacement, customers can do VoIP by adding a VoIP card to the chassis.
The IOC market however is not huge. As mentioned above, service providers have instead been focused on hosted VoIP deployments. Taqua’s competitor from pre-hosted-VoIP times, MetaSwitch, has also since changed gears. Metaswitch now offers disaggregated application server solution as well and has been very successful selling it. In addition, the TDM portion of Metaswitch business has substantially declined and is being substituted by pure IP gear which forms most of Metaswitch sales at present.