Alcatel Snaps Up Two U.S. Companies
In the larger of the two deals, Alcatel plans to pay approximately $250 million in stock for Spatial Wireless, a Richardson, Texas-based provider of mobile softswitches aimed at service providers.
Spatial's flagship Atrium product is a multiprotocol core softswitch that supports GSM/EDGE, 3G/UMTS and CDMA networks.
"Through the acquisition of Spatial Wireless, Alcatel leapfrogs traditional mobile-switching technologies and builds a powerful offering adapted to address the U.S. and CDMA markets, in addition to our GSM/UMTS-based customers," said Mike Quigley, executive vice president of Alcatel, Paris, and president of Alcatel North America, in a statement.
Spatial Wireless has 225 employees, with offices in the United States and India. The deal is expected to close during the fourth quarter.
Alcatel is also paying $27 million in stock and cash for eDial, a privately held conferencing and collaboration vendor based in Waltham, Mass., in a deal that closed Friday. EDial's portfolio includes an open software-based communications platform for voice, data and videoconferencing built on Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), an emerging standard.
EDial's software will be incorporated into My Teamworks, the conferencing application that is part of Alcatel's OmniTouch Unified Communication software suite.
The software vendor currently employs approximately 30 people and serves more than 100 customers, including enterprises and service providers.
EDial's current development, sales and support operations will remain in Waltham, Alcatel said.