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Mitel Buys Polycom For $1.96B In Enterprise Communications Consolidation Play (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Mitel announced that it would acquire Polycom in a cash-and-stock deal with a total value of $1.96 billion, creating a company with combined sales of $2.5 billion and 7,700 employees. Polycom's acquisition by Mitel comes at a key time in the world of enterprise communications and collaboration. On one hand, it is a time of massive change and evolution. For years a lot of the services that companies used were based on legacy networking, but in the last decade there has been a big shift to IP-based networks for many of these services. However, at the same time the whole space has been massively disrupted by startups that are upsetting by tapping into the next phase of digital services -- the internet. Companies like Microsoft by way of services like Skype and Yammer, and smaller startups like Slack, are overturning the whole idea of how people who are not in the same office floor can communicate and collaborate for work. These solutions are way cheaper than a lot of the legacy offerings; they tap into the cloud-based services that are now ubiquitous to share and work on files; and they are also built in very user-friendly ways, based around tech that ordinary consumers are using. Both companies compete against the likes of Cisco and Avaya. Mitel is perhaps best known for its IP telephony solutions, including PBX systems, while Polycom is a leader in conferencing services. They also cover SIP technology, and customers span 82% of Fortune 500 companies.
The shareholders of Polycom will get cash AND end up with 60% of the combined entity.
That is a lot more of "Polycom bought Mitel" than "Mitel bought Polycom."
Add the "keeping the name", "keeping the products", and escaping US legal and tax for better environment in Canada, and it all makes the same amount of sense as any other international merger (now limited by US tax laws to 60%/40%, conveniently the same as this one...)
I guess nobody crafted a special law to prevent Polycom from doing it like they did to Pfizer. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04...
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> Companies like Microsoft by way of services like Skype and Yammer, and smaller startups like Slack, are overturning the whole idea of how people who are not in the same office floor can communicate and collaborate for work
I don't know sh*t about Slack, but all Microsoft is providing businesses with is opportunities to say "Hello? Are you still there? Can you hear me? I think there's a bit of a delay...". So no, Microsoft isn't overturning shit. They're not in the same ballpark, not even on the same planet. Properly set up IP PBX and Polycom/Cisco phones is THE way real businesses communicate. You use MS Lync/Skype only if you want to embarrass yourself.
I don't know what to make of it, but I recently saw this topic in the Pale Moon forums.
For those who don't know, Pale Moon is a fork of Firefox that tries to undo some of the controversial changes that Mozilla has made lately. Pale Moon is seeing rapid adoption, while Firefox's market share has been dropping.
The topic is vague, but it claims that at least one of the Pale Moon developers was 'contacted by Mozilla with the request to "police" our forum'.
I don't see the actual request itself disclosed, and I don't see any details about who made this request. So I really don't know what to think or believe.
Can anyone shed some light on this incident and what might be happening?
Somebody with an account (sorry I don't have one) should submit this story to Slashdot. This is the kind of stuff that should be reported on the front page here.
You don't need an account to submit a story.
I have worked in places with many different telephone systems, from Siemens, Alcatel, Bosch etc. - mostly ones already 10+ years old. They all had their pro's and con's. But none of that prepared me for the horror of working with a Mitel IP phone on my desk. Its user interface must have been invented by apes on LSD, even the most simple of functions (like looking up a number in the phone book) take dozens of key presses, every function is incoherently mapped to arbitrary keys (it's not like you could even expect that the same key is used to leave a menu or get you back into the "home" menu). The phone takes about a minute(!) to boot, then crashes/reboots about once per day without any specific trigger (and it's not a single one that does - the ones of my colleagues, too). Extra features cost a fortune - the Bluetooth module for example is more expensive than a good smartphone that of course contains Bluetooth. And the extra modules comes with configuration in yet another completely counter-intuitive menu structure, and of course the pairing to Bluetooth headsets is unstable like crazy.
So I can only hope this fusion will somehow result in bankruptcy of the company and a slow, horrible death for all those who turned Mitel IP phones into the instruments of torture they are.
But Mitel is a disease that infects anything it touches. Aastra used to be very nice phones...
Cntl-F NEC - no hits. gee...and they're the market leader. Like talking about operating systems w/o microsoft. Cisco - for people who burn money as a hobby. Mitel- hotels only. Shoretel/Asterisk - for those who enjoy having to learn how to fix things themselves. Polycom - nice pure SIP conference/speaker phones for addition to any SIP compatible systems. Toshiba/panasonic/avaya in there too, just a little more difficult to set up due to legacy digital system only company history.
Skype/vonage/lync - LOL. amateur hour. go get your magic jack and return to the kiddy pool.
This fleeing to canada will help both. polycom needs the tax break, and mitel needs some help merging into the pure IP/SIP world.
This same thing just happened to Broadcom. Look what they are doing to their R&D groups now.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
I know the daughter of the founder of Inter-Tel, which merged with Mitel in 2007. It'd be interesting to know the rest of what happened there. I guess the business was huge, in the 1980's and 1990's...