In the course of reporting Nokia Siemens' interest in buying much of Nortel's carrier assets, the Wall Street Journal says (subscription required) that the bankruptcy court has been conducting an auction of the Enterprise Solutions business unit as well, naming Avaya, Siemens Enterprise Communications and a previously-unreported third bidder, a private capital firm called Golden Gate Capital, which owns Aspect Software.The Aspect angle is the new one here. That would be a very complementary pairing, making the combination a strong contender in the contact center thanks to both Aspect's and Nortel's strengths in that segment. It would also combine two companies that have significant Unified Communications partnerships with Microsoft.
The Journal article states that bids for all the Nortel units are "believed to be low," though there's no definition of "low."
Obviously, the circumstances will dictate any selling price that Nortel Enterprise fetches, but you do have to wonder what we'll wind up learning from this process. Nortel Enterprise is arguably the most valuable asset that is likely to come up for acquisition in the course of the entire consolidation process that the industry has embarked upon. The only companies with larger market shares and/or installed bases--Cisco and Avaya--are potential acquirers, certainly not targets. Everybody else has significantly less market share, at least in North America.
The down side is that big market share means big migration headache/integration challenge. And what we heard from Nortel customers last week at VoiceCon is that those who are currently in procurement mode are looking seriously at other alternatives, as you'd expect they would. So the value of that installed base is less than it would be if Nortel were not in Chapter 11 today. Finally, private equity firms can look at the sum that Silver Lake and TPG paid for Avaya and see a clear warning sign when it comes to overpaying.
I don't know that these musings come out to any particular conclusion, only that if Nortel Enterprise winds up being sold out of an auction at bankruptcy court, the buyer could potentially be getting a bargain.
