Marketwatch is reporting that Alcatel-Lucent is considering selling off its enterprise business unit, which includes communications gear and the highly successful Genesys contact center product line.
Marketwatch reports: "The Franco-American company has hired advisers and in recent days began to examine options for the business, which has about $1.5 billion in annual sales. Besides a sale to a single buyer, other options include an initial public offering. An Alcatel-Lucent spokesman declined to comment."
A telling passage from the Marketwatch report: "The [enterprise] business is growing and profitable, one person said, but it accounts for less than 10% of the [overall ALU] company's annual revenue, and in many ways doesn't fit with its main operation, which is selling network gear to telecom carriers."
Among potential suitors, the report lists Microsoft, HP, Ericsson, and private equity buyers. Only the last of those makes any sense at all to me. Ericsson seems unlikely, as they divested their home-grown PBX business a couple of years ago. Similarly, HP recently confirmed that it was all but killing any future development on the 3Com communications products it acquired when it bought that vendor last year for its routers and other data networking products. And Microsoft has repeatedly passed on acquisitions of available enterprise communications vendors like Siemens Enterprise and Nortel.
Here's my candidate for an acquirer: IBM. IBM has doggedly stayed away from offering its own platform (i.e., PBX), opting instead for a middleware strategy with Sametime Unified Telephony, a product that connects multiple vendors' PBXs. But IBM may find that it needs to have its own play in PBXs.
ALU would be a great fit for IBM because it's really done an impressive job building its software strategy, largely on the strength of the Genesys products. And IBM has been active in the contact center software area, as Doug Carolus describes in this recent No Jitter item.
It'd be a shame to see ALU Enterprise lose momentum if the uncertainty of a potential sale were to hang over it for an extended period of time--as happened when Siemens AG spun out its Enterprise division and spent two years looking for a buyer before the unit was picked up for a song by Gores Group.
ALU is just coming off what seemed like a very successful event in Barcelona, debuting a lot of new ideas and fresh thinking about communications in the enterprise of the future. Hopefully these innovations won't be lost if the company is entering a new phase.
Here are some of No Jitter's blogs on that recent ALU event:
Another Log on the Tablets-for-Enterprise-versus-iPad Fire
"Immersive Communications:" An Upcoming Telepresence Alternative
Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise: The Carrier Story
Alcatel-Lucent and the Dynamic Enterprise
