Aastra aims to shake up Aussie enterprise telephony market

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 28 August 2008 12:19

IT Industry - Strategy

This is the result of Ericsson's earlier moves to distance itself from its enterprise telephony business. In March 2001 Ericsson sold its enterprise direct sales and service operations in 19 countries, including Australia, to Apax Partners Funds for $US480 million and the business was renamed Damovo. Australia was "one of the five key markets for the group and one of the six key 'Centres For Excellence'.

Shortly afterwards, Damovo acquired Telstra's PABX maintenance business. In Australia the business grew,  taking on enterprise telephony products from other major vendors before being sold to Telstra in September 2008. (Telstra snatched it form Optus which was baulking at the price).

Aastra has grown its telephony business over the past decade through a series of acquisitions: from Nortel; of Swiss company Ascom; and several other businesses. Today, according to Shen the former Ericsson business is 25-30 percent of Aastra. "Ericsson brings us a great footprint globally, and some unique product capability in particular the mobility aspect," Shen said. "We used to be in 16 countries, now we are in about 35."

 Ovum commented that "The new FMC and Mobile Extension solutions added to [Aastra's] existing SIP-based DECT products will provide a comprehensive portfolio for enterprises with mobile users in and out of the campus. However, some product rationalisation will be required to address overlaps between the existing and acquired product portfolios."

Aastra also has a relationship with hosted IP telephony application specialist BroadSoft and is an OEMer of Microsoft's ResponsePoint IP PBX . However Shen said there were no plans to launch it in Australia. One of its key features is its voice activated user interface and this would need localising by Microsoft to make it suitable for the Australian market.

According to Ovum the price paid by Aastra for the Ericsson business, $US104.6 million, was "reasonable price for the product line-up and strong international play acquired." Ovum said: "This has already proven to be money well spent, as the consolidated company has experienced a significant net increase in sales in all regions since the acquisition on 30 April 2008. It has not been without some pain though. Excluding the impact of the new business, sales would have declined by approximately 4.0 percent as sales of existing products were lower in each of [Aastra's] largest markets in Europe.