Stratus, Emergent join combo craze

Stratus Technologies will announce at Fall VON this week in Boston that it has acquired Emergent Network Solutions in a deal that will take Stratus beyond its service layer voice-over-IP and fixed/mobile convergence solutions and into the network control plane with the help of Emergent's softswitch and session border control products.

The acquisition also gives Stratus a stronger play in the emerging IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) market, with the addition of products that will evolve to become IMS network elements. Another vendor, GenBand, recently made a similar foray into IMS with its acquisition of BayPackets.

The $11 million Stratus/Emergent deal actually closed earlier this month, and Emergent's 32 employees will continue to work out of the 5-year-old company's base in Allen, Texas. Emergent founder Nathan Franzmeier has become vice president of Emergent Network Solutions, a new Stratus business unit. Ironically, both Stratus and Emergent were once spinoffs from Lucent Technologies.

Ali Kafel, vice president of telecom sales for Stratus, said the company is ready to increase telecom revenues from the current 22% of total.

“With everything moving to converged telecom solutions, we feel the opportunity is right to grow that leg of the business,” he said. “We have focused on service mediation before, solving some of the problems not addressed in IMS, like mediation of services between GSM and CDMA environments. Now, we're fueling our growth by adding more to the product line.”

Though Stratus will pursue more Tier 2 and Tier 3 carrier business, the Emergent addition also will improve its ability to compete with larger vendors for Tier 1 carrier contracts.

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