A surprising MWC announcement came in the form of Mitel acquiring Mavenir, a VoLTE and RCS pioneer, for $560 million, a healthy premium considering Mavenir’s annual revenue of $130 million. However, Mitel, a provider of enterprise unified communications (UCC) solutions, sees this as a strategic move into the mobile world of LTE and IP, VoLTE and VoWiFi and the ability to deliver richer mobile UCC experience across all-IP enterprise and mobile networks. Mitel believes acquiring Mavenir will expand its total addressable market by approximately $14 billion by 2018.
Mavenir mainly sells software-based IMS components, session border controllers and application servers to operators, enabling WiFi integration, Web RTC integration, and VoLTE and Rich Communications Services (RCS). Mavenir’s customers include 15 of the top 20 mobile operators worldwide, including Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone, Tele2, EE, and 3 in Europe, as well as all of the U.S. mobile operators.
Mitel believes it can help Mavenir to scale and sell to more operators where it is up against giants such as Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia. Mavenir will retain its brand and become the mobile business division of Mitel.
Mavenir President and CEO Pardeep Kohli commented, “We see the trend of convergence and our combined synergy to bring native IP rich communications experience to millions of mobile users. Mitel brings scale, reach and UC know-how mainly on the fixed enterprise side whereas Mavenir brings mobile LTE and mobile IP core expertise and a solid base of mobile operator customers.”
