Newest acquisition rumor: A Nortel-focused blog called All About Nortel says IBM is considering a purchase of Nortel, guesstimating that you'd be looking at about a $4 billion deal.
I'm not really sure why this would make a lot of sense, at least from a UC perspective, for either side. Though they integrate with IBM, Nortel has thrown its lot in with Microsoft. Nortel would have to do an awful lot of backpedaling and explaining to anyone who invested in their solutions in the belief that it was the best way to plan a reasonably painless migration toward Office Communications Server.
And from the IBM side, I don't know why the deal would make sense. IBM is now overwhelmingly a software and services company, and Nortel still sells quite a bit of hardware--not just in the enterprise, but all sorts of carrier gear, from metro Ethernet and optical to CDMA wireless. Within the enterprise, Nortel still supports a sizeable legacy TDM PBX base and has been making an aggressive run at Cisco in the switch/router market by trying to use the issue of energy consumption.
I'd be very surprised if IBM wanted to be in the carrier-equipment business, or the switch/router business. Would they really buy the whole company just to get the enterprise communications line?
This one's a head-scratcher.
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