Tekelec acquires VocalData

Tekelec said today it has acquired Richardson, Texas-based VocalData, a provider of hosted IP telephony applications for a total of $27.5 million, which includes $14.5 million in cash and $13 million in Tekelec stock. This is Tekelec’s second acquisition announcement within the last month designed to advance its convergence strategy.

Four weeks ago, Tekelec announced the acquisition of Steleus, a performance monitoring company out of Westford, Mass., and the formation of a new Communications Software Solutions business unit, which Steleus will anchor. The deal closed today.

Fred Lax, CEO of Tekelec, said at the time that the acquisition completed the third strategic initiative of a triangulation between its next generation switching and signaling platforms. Tekelec also acquired the switching leg of that strategy through the acquisitions of Taqua Systems in April and Santera Systems in June of last year.

Today Lax said, “Tekelec has always felt that we needed an application server to compliment our switching solution and there are three in the business today: BroadSoft, Sylantro and VocalData. We believe VocalData is the market leader today with 44% of all the IP Centrex lines deployed at the end of last year.”

VocalData also have a 34% share of all the IP Centrex lines shipped in the last 18 months, Lax said.

VocalData’s hosted IP Centrex platform is deployed in 50 locations, including Chicago-based Globalcom, which it picked up in June, as well as New Zealand-based service provider, ihug, which it signed in July.

Other recent customers include Onit Communications, Intellivox Communications, Wercs Communications, ImproComm and True Broadband. VocalData also claims the world’s largest SIP deployment for hosted VoIP at NTT, which has 40,000 lines.

Lax said at the time of the Steleus acquisition that the addressable market for the software applications business is approximately $2 billion and with that acquisition his company could address a $500 million market. “So we see the opportunity to develop further applications either organically, through partnerships or other means,” Lax said.

With this acquisition Tekelec can differentiate its IP offerings from a switching perspective from both wireline and wireless with IP hosted services as well, Lax said today. “We will be the only supplier of next generation switching that I am aware of that will now be offering IP hosted services in a bundled solution in a significant way.”

Analyst Rich Church of CE Unterberg Towbin reiterated his "buy" rating on Tekelec earlier today, citing its recent acquisition activities (not including the acquisition of VocalData, which happened later in the day) and those of its partners. Church said Tekelec’s partnership between the company and Spatial Wireless is unlikely to be impacted by Alcatel’s acquisition of Spatial Wireless. Tekelec’s Santera division holds approximately a 10% stake in Spatial Wireless, but that Tekelec intends to reinvest the $25 million received from the Spatial Wireless stake sell-off back into its business and aims to breakeven in its VoIP division by mid-2005.

VocalData will be integrated into Tekelec’s switching solutions group, headquartered in Texas. Tekelec’s Santera and Taqua groups are there as well. “These three will comprise our switching solutions group with Vocaldata being a hosted IP services application that can be bundled in conjunction with switching solutions, incorporated into Tekelec’s Eagle Signaling system, or offered on a standalone basis,” Lax said.