Red Dragon,
yea I meant revenues.
I would expect that Lucent-Octel will invest heavily to get Octels product line upto the task of world-class cellular mesagging. Expect it to take a while. One thing for sure, Sierra will never be amajor player in the Cellular market. It is not truly fault tolerant which requires no single point of failure and hot-swappable hard drives (with supporting software), full disk redundancy etc. Also, Sierra is totally closed architecture, even the OS is proprietary. It is 8 years old, and has maybe 2 years of life as a sellable product. Beyond that, Sierra will be a maintenance only product. Supposadly Octel is working on a new platform called Intellegent Messaging Archetecture (IMA). IMA is over 2 years late, and there has been no word on its status or ship date if ever. So we will see. OCtel's real strength is enterprise CPE (larger capacity NW systems). Their Overture is a strong product line (mostly the acquired form VMS). The only problem I see for Octel-Lucent relative to enterprise CPE is the fact that they will ultimately lose the Lucent PBX Competitor's channels (i.e. Mitel, NEC, Fujitsu, etc., will probably not want to sell Octel systems if an whenever possible). Look for strategic partnerships to be announced.
I see the beneficiaries of the buyout as CGRM, and ACVC, possibly AVT as well. These companies will probably have the PBX vendors knocking their doors down looking for partnerships.
I guess we should not discount the possiblity of a VM feeding frenzy as the big PBX makers could move to buy the remaining independents. THis would be vary bad for VM in the long run, as historically, PBX companies have failed miserably with VMail (i.e At&t-Audix, ROLM-PhoneMail, NT-Meridian, etc.). Of all of these, only NT is still a player, and it is pretty lackluster. Believe it or not, just about a decade ago, ROLM was the #1 VM provider. |
