I am not sure how familiar you are with the name CounterPath, but the mouse just swallowed another little cub from the FMC zoo. Bridgeport Networks is the second FMC vendor acquisition of the week for the relatively lesser known CounterPath that licenses out its softphones to vendors and service providers. The first acquisition of the week was Firsthand Technologies that also falls under the FMC category.
So where would CounterPath be taking its FMC assets? Neither of the two acquired companies offer UMA flavour. So there are not going to be any consumer FMC deployments just yet. The only successful consumer FMC offerings that can be seen out there are UMA based which is a more mature FMC option. The company will have to perhaps wait one more year to see VCC gaining traction. It now has both an enterprise FMC product (Fristhand) and consumer FMC product (Bridgeport) under its belt. I would guess that the company will perhaps target MVNOs that are the ideal VCC target customers.
On the enterprise FMC side it is likely to continue working with OEMs like Nortel, a channel that Firsthand had secured prior to their acquisition. A better strategy would be to target the SOHO service provider breed such as Vocalocity, Phone.com, and Toktumi. GIPS, another softphone vendor like CounterPath that powered the early versions of Skype, is also changing direction somewhat and offering feature server capabilities geared toward the SOHO service provider segment. GIPS’ first customer is Toktumi.
FMC vendor space is one area which is truly cluttered. There are dozens of well funded vendors that have been counting waves for the last two long years. There is just no demand yet. Even BT had to put a stop to marketing of its FMC offering recently. Among the vendors – and there is a zoo out there - only Kineto Wireless and Alcatel-Lucent have managed to find some calculated traction. And that is perhaps because they have pushed UMA more which has so far been a more mature FMC flavour comparatively. The VCC based FMC has been a joke. The subscriber count worldwide for VCC based offering falls under 100k. BridgePort Networks comes under the VCC kind of camp.
Firsthand got taken out for $9.3 million. The company had raised about $15 million in funding. CounterPath has not revealed how much it paid for Bridgeport which raised over $50 million in funding. Or maybe it has revealed the amount. I could not derive it from their 8-K filing. Bridgeport will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary after the acquisition.