Motorola pursues seamless mobility with Netopia acquisition

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 15 November 2006 06:02

IT Industry - Deals

Motorola has announced the latest in a string of acquisitions aimed at promoting its goal of seamless mobility, with plans to buy NASDAQ-listed telco equipment maker, Netopia for $US208 million.
 

Netopia is a provider of carrier-class broadband customer premise equipment (CPE), remote management software and broadband services to telecom operators worldwide. The company provides a portfolio of products for DSL networks, including wired and wireless modems, routers, and gateways, that deliver voice, video, data, and other advanced services to residential and business customers.

"Motorola and Netopia share a common vision of the connected home as the hub for seamless mobility," said Dan Moloney, president, Motorola Connected Home Solutions. "This acquisition advances our vision by strengthening the connected home solutions business position as a leading supplier of technology and services to telecom providers worldwide."

Motorola said the acquisition would enable it to further address the global broadband DSL opportunity. "Netopia's carrier-class portfolio of products and technologies extends Motorola's current solutions for the emerging IPTV opportunity. As a combined product portfolio, Motorola will now offer a full suite of home CPE for copper-based telecom networks - including home media hubs, voice gateways, and IP set-tops. This will complement the leading video, voice, and data portfolio Motorola already provides for HFC and optical network operators worldwide.

"Further, Netopia's software solutions add unique service and device management capabilities to Motorola. This proven platform provides for the centralised management of IP-based gateways, modems, and voice-over-IP equipment."

In July Motorola announced plans to acquire Broadbus Technologies According to Motorola, Broadbus' key advantage is its solid-state server architecture based on the intelligent configuration and management of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), which "uses less space and power than traditional hard-disk based technology, while providing performance, reliability and scalability improvements for video ingest, streaming, and storage.""