Mitolycom: Blabbing About Potential Merger of Mitel and Polycom.

March 17, 2016 by Dave Michels

Zeus Kerravala and I hosted a Blab on the potential merger of Mitel and Polycom. Still unsure about this Blab thing, but it is indeed fun. Simon Dudley joined in and we had a good conversation about this possibility and/or inevitably.

This topic first emerged last October, and I wrote this post explaining why it was a bad idea. The public conversation on this disappeared until this week. But it seems that negotiations are indeed underway.

eWeek (hat tip to MJGraves for flagging this for me).

Reuters

By Dave Michels

Dave is an independent analyst and founder of TalkingPointz which is focused on enterprise communications. In addition to this (free and paid) content on TalkingPointz, he contributes to industry sites, can be found at major industry events, and provides advisory services to vendors and financial analysts.

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Discussion

Peter Radizeski March 21, 2016

With the personnel changes at Polycom, it looks like this deal is progressing. All about the money and the shareholders.

Reply
Andrew Davis March 26, 2016

You guys covered a lot of points, some fully baked, some not so fully. Did anybody mention that Polycom’s main market (room systems) is on the decline while at the same time Polycom faces fierce competition from C. Also, Microsoft is always a dangerous, fickle, over-reaching, “partner” that is a never-ending threat to become a competitor. Project Rigel is likely to make P just one of many partners. The situation today however is Microsoft is a strategic partner to Polycom. Bottom line: Polycom today, with its new line of products and Microsoft story, has POTENTIAL. Time to sell is when you have potential energy, not kinetic. Unrelated point: just because Mitel is good at acquisitions and just because they can acquire P, doesn’t mean they should. Key question: who decides (shareholders, management, directors)?

Reply
etljnoy March 29, 2016

Dave,
An interesting blab, I for one do not see a marriage between these two companies being successful. This deal if it moves forward is driven by short term financial gain and little long term vision. I could see a fit with the acquisition of Aastra for Mitel and also how the businesses could be merged relatively painlessly. Mitel and Polycom would be a much more complicated affair, and potentially damaging.
I was a little disappointed in your framing of the discussion, it was very North American centric. This was really apparent with the positioning of Mitel as competing with the likes of Shortel and Vonage, perhaps in the US you see it like that but the rest of the world they have a Enterprise presence they are seeking to build upon as I understand it.
Microsoft are of course the elephant in the room, and the challenge to Cisco, Mitel, Polycom is to find effective strategies to co-exist a prosper. It would be a brave person to predict anything in this marketplace even two years downstream.
I hope this is just financial noise to stir up share prices and nothing more.

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