Mitel To Buy Telepo
Acquisitive Aastra managed to make another acquisition before being acquired itself by Mitel. Aastra announced today that is acquired Telepo, while just last week it announced its own shareholders approved its sale to Mitel. By law of transitive property, Mitel is about to acquire Telepo.
Telepo is a Swedish firm that creates a UC hosted platform sold to service providers. It is not a service provider itself, but has about 100k active users via 16 service providing customers. Aastra likely had this acquisition in process when it was announced that it would acquired by Mitel. Since the Mitel/Aastra deal is expected to complete this quarter, Aastra required Mitel’s approval to close on Telepo. Mitel said “Ja tack!”
In case you don’t speak Swedish, the transliterated statement from Mitel says: “Mitel is delighted with Aastra’s acquisition of European-based cloud company Telepo. As we have previously stated, consistent with Mitel’s strategy to drive profitable growth the rapidly growing cloud services market is a significant point of focus and investment for Mitel. Upon completion of the merger of Mitel and Aastra, Telepo’s multi-tenant solution will complement Mitel’s current cloud solutions, further strengthening the combined company’s global cloud customer footprint and market position.”
Telepo’s providers are in Scandinavia, Germany, Benelux, and UK. Its largest customers are TelisaSonera and Tele2 in Sweden. It was profitable in 2013 and grew its revenue by 80 percent.
WSJ reports, “Telepo offers carrier-grade, cloud-based, multi-tenant Unified Communication (UC) solutions. Telepo’s solution is based on a web-centric architecture which is highly scalable, flexible and offers best-in-class mobile integration, including the full range of standard voice, PBX and call center features with fully-integrated security and pre-built web based portals for multiple tiers of administrators.”
Aastra did not have a native cloud platform for Europe. Some Aastra partners were hosting and reselling services with the MX-ONE, but it is not a multi-tenant solution thus not particularly effective for smaller opportunities.
Telepo has Ericsson lineage, and originally developed a solution intended to complement the MX-ONE. In fact, Ericsson engineers were involved in the initial specifications. In 2008, Aastra acquired Ericsson’s PBX business.
It fills a hole for Mitel as well as Aastra. The deal represents more customers and another platform for Mitel. Mitel’s current solutions for service providers are multi-instance and virtualized, but not multi-tenant – thus best suited for end users with 50 or more users. Telepo scales down to one user.
Notable characteristics of the Telepo solution include: multi-device support including mobiles, PCs, Macs, and deskphones; quick implementations (four months for a telco); and rich APIs.
Aastra is acquiring 100 percent of Telepo for an undisclosed sum. No significant departures at Telepo are expected. In fact, Aastra reports that Telepo is hiring. Aastra and Mitel intend to continue Telepo’s operations without any significant short term changes.