Broadband Developments

Last month John and I both read between the lines on Mark Straton’s UC Summit keynote to see Siemens was actively being shopped. This week Siemens CFO Joe Kaeser expressed the difficulty in finding a suitor and said Siemens might be willing to enter into a partnership, possibly temporary, with any potential buyer to seal the deal. He also said that interest in SEN has recently picked back up and I think we’ll seen an announcement before the end of calendar Q3.

It’s well known that Nortel and Cerebus Capital have been the most aggressive in their attempts to acquire SEN, however that rumor has been swirling for almost two years with no additional traction. Could it be a smokescreen in Nortel’s continued quest to stay relevant and Cerebus nothing more than feelers? According to NoJitter’s Brian Riggs “Siemens Enterprise Communications CEO Thomas Zimmerman describes his company as in a state of ‘advanced stages of talk with various partners’.” Unless a new suitor has popped up and is staying quiet, either Nortel or Cerebus is ready to make a move. Nortel could see this as a cheap way of picking up an additional 10% marketshare in the US and a much greater position in EMEA while Cerebus might look at reorganizing the business and reselling it in pieces for a profit. In the latter situation, Nortel might still be a suitor but it wouldn’t represent such a bargain.

On a purely UC note, I don’t see Siemens’ OpenScape platform surviving the transition. Despite an impressive featureset it’s never gotten the market penetration to be a leader. Between a few significant wins for both IBM’s Lotus Sametime, Microsoft’s OCS and the MSFT/Nortel venture to move UC to the cloud, Siemens has been mostly left in the dust in the UC market.