The Financial Times reports that the Gores Group, which owns 51% of Siemens Enterprise Communications, has approached Polycom about a possible acquisition and merger of Polycom with SEN.The FT article reports that Gores approached Polycom last October about an acquisition but was turned down. I interviewed then-Siemens CEO Mark Stone in November and he made it clear that Gores would be aggressively pursuing acquisitions to bolster SEN. Stone, a top Gores Group exec, stepped in as SEN CEO when James O'Neill left the company; a new CEO, Hamid Akhavan, was named in December.
Polycom has been widely considered to be an acquisition target ever since Cisco announced its acquisition of Tandberg. Together, Polycom and Tandberg own about three-quarters of the room videoconferencing market, according to Wainhouse Research.
Adding Polycom to Siemens Enterprise Communications would be another major step for SEN in its bid to make a serious run at the top tier of communications vendors in North America. SEN is already a communications powerhouse in most other global regions, but has been well behind North American leaders Avaya and Cisco. Though it wouldn't add a new customer base in core communications systems (i.e., what we used to call PBXs), it would give Siemens access to major accounts that use Polycom for video and for phones.
But that's a double-edged sword: Polycom, especially in the phone market, has been attractive as a partner precisely because it plays with all the major vendors. Even if that continues to be true from a technological standpoint, customers will clearly be nervous about relationships if both Tandberg and Polycom are owned by two of the competing core vendors.
Note that this situation is very fluid--Gores jumped back into the game after another PE firm's bid for Polycom went public recently. So we could be looking at a bidding war for Polycom between at least 2 and possibly more players.
