Just two months after putting itself up for sale, Veraz Networks announced it has been acquired by Dialogic, perhaps best known for its CTI past but more recently focused on “application enablement,” particuarly in the mobile arena. In the service provider market, Dialogic products include TDM-IP voice and video gateways; SS7 and SIGTRAN signaling; and IP-to-IP border elements with security services, such as SIP mediation. That product mix is very complementary to Veraz’s recent IP/IMS push, focused initially around voice but more recently applying those same bandwidth optimization technologies to help mobile operators squeeze more apps down their pipes.
In a conference call on the deal this morning, Dialogic CEO Nick Jensen described his company’s opportunities in mobile:
We don’t do the applications. What we do is, look at us as the engine inside. So you have all these great customers out there. What they use inside is all about engines. So what we provide is the technology, SigTran technology for the LVS for the billing and enabling all of the media streaming to do both the video streaming, to do the video transcoding, all of that is inside the box.
So we don’t do the applications. We don’t compete with our customers. We’re completely agnostic to technology whether it’s CMA or 3G or 4G.
Connected Planet’s take,
Rich Karpinski
It’s hard not to feel that Veraz is disappearing into Dialogic, but the real play for the combined companies is to combine Dialogic’s ability to help operators — and enterprises — deliver mobile applications with Veraz’s IP/IMS infrastructure capabilities to help deliver those same apps over tomorrow’s more complex and disaggregated 4G networks. It’s interesting that Veraz recently started talking about applying its voice optimization technology to data/video being delivered over mobile networks because that will certainly be a major opportunity for the combined companies, as well.
In the end, though, Veraz just couldn’t get big enough or manage to chew off a big enough opportunity-space to get to critical mass and, in particular, survive last year’s downturn. Combined the two companies, with total revenues of $250 million, should have plenty opportunities to chase.
That’s our take on this. Let us know what you think in the comments section below: