[super sushi]
greetings david,
thanks for posting the latest wsj dt stuff... might have missed it otherwise
fwiw, at least for part of the story, am inclined towards sushi , as STK1 put it ...
my money is on fujitsu for the strategic partner that "VocalTec is seeking to form a separate entity with " for enterprise-oriented operations... as vocaltec has been working already with fujitsu for corporate/enterprise solutions...
As you probably know, vocaltec and fujitsu (fujitsu business systems) announced a distribution agreement early in 98 to "deliver ip telephony solutions to (the) corporate market" ... the first market targeted was japan where together they won some business with japan telecom...
as don walster put it in his report from h&q (thanks don!): "In addition, in a private question and answer period, someone asked about Japan. His "no comment" answer was not a "no", but was construed as something which he was not at liberty to discuss at the present time."...
and fujitsu as a major systems player (along with all the others) could use all the ip telephony expertise they can get their hands on...
also coming at this from another angle... would think the fit pretty good as fujitsu is also working with dt for a related rollout... fujitsu partnered with orct (another israeli co) has 1/2 the contract for the dt adsl (broadband) rollout which is just starting to gear up in a major way...
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and in the way of background:
the expertise/product line which formed the core of the uk vocaltec operation which is marked to be either spunoff or divested, was purchased by vocaltec in 96 in a stock transition valued at the time at US$ 1.3 million ... this company was originally based in the usa (massachusetts) and was known as "Insitu Inc." ... description from vocaltec:
"In April 1996, the Company acquired all the assets of Insitu Inc., a Massachusetts corporation, which was the producer of the Insitu Conference™ software for collaborative computing.The acquisition expanded VocalTec's product lines by adding multimedia collaboration software and provided a technology framework for future multimedia business and commercial Internet/intranet products."
best o luck
s |
