Acme Packet should be buying Nortel’s VoIP product line
Acme Packet has made a smart move acquiring enterprise-SBC company, Covergence. (Here is one of my writeups on Covergence). I think a smarter bet would be buying Nortel’s carrier VoIP assets, particularly the MCS platform. Acme Packet needs to become more diversified. It cannot conquer the market with a point solution.
The company is focussed on SBCs only. That is both its strength as well as its weakness. It is a weakness because some of the bigger guys have chosen to embed the SBC capability in routers and media gateways. The other bigger players that have not done so will surely come up with their own SBC product in due course. Acquiring a softswitch/feature-server could initially put Acme in competition with some of its main OEM channel partners like Alcatel-Lucent and NSN. This could perhaps lock Acme out of OEM deals. However, as mentioned, these vendors will eventually bring out their own SBC platforms. So Acme will be locked out of OEM deals anyway at some point. It therefore makes sense to be prepared for such a scenario. The company has to therefore diversify.
The best opportunity right now is to acquire Nortel’s VoIP assets (assuming Acme Packet can afford the price). Nortel’s VoIP platform is a market leader. It is certainly popular among the cable companies, which means Acme could get its foot inside the cable doors. I think with Nortel VoIP assets acquisition, we can (1) have another major non-legacy VoIP startup besides Sonus in the market, and such as deal will (2) secure the future of Acme Packet as a diversified telecom vendor, which the market badly needs right now.
NSN, Huawei and Genband are supposed to have considered acquiring Nortel’s VoIP assets. It does not make sense for Genband to acquire softswithes and feature servers since they have previously offloaded such assets. Huawei certainly won’t gain much in terms of solution capabilities. I think NSN might still be interested because it is aggressively pursuing cable business in North America. Besides that, Nortel is slightly ahead of NSN in terms of SIP capability in its platforms, which is something NSN might benefit from.
