Acme Packet (AKPT) makers of session border controllers and related real time communications technology has been acquired by Oracle, reports the New York Times this morning and others including Reuters.
This is an interesting grab by one of the tech world's true giants because it sqaurely puts Oracle into a game where they begin to compete with the giants of telecom, many of whom run Oracle software to drive things including SBC's, media gateways and firewall technology that's sold. What's more it means that for companies which compete with Acme Packet, like Sansay, a San Diego based private company founded by friend Andy Voss, that they now have an even bigger opportunity to take away market share from Acme Packet with Sansay's home grown technology that is viewed by many of their customers to be better, faster, more reliable and from whom they get real insight into VoIP network and topology issues. If nothing else, it increases Sansay's valuation, and will likely cause others in the space like Sonus to all embark on a very aggressive partnering and sales effort as mergers like these often cause attrition, if not immeditely, over the first 18 months.
How Oracle integrates a Real Time Communications business into their portfolio, and what this means for things like their cloud offerings is yet to be known. What this will do though is create excitement in the valley and across the country, as this will likely trigger companies like Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Cisco, Juniper Network, F5 and others, as well as security and firewall companies to realize that they now have a giant that knows how to sell in and through in both to legacy as well as startups, forcing them all to become as nimble as Oracle is. I would not be surprised to see SAP want to get in the game, and they would be wise to look no further than Voss and his Sansay team.
On a related note, one has to also see this as Mark Hurd further going after an already weakened telecom networking business over at former employers H-P.
Almost has to be a WebRTC and/or CU-RTC-WEB bet? Wouldn't be surprised if Cisco considered this play as well. Juniper bought Kagoor years ago but agree this will help trigger more big player movement.
Posted by: Gilzino | February 04, 2013 at 09:34 AM