Two international deployments, and two persistent M&A rumors for this Friday morning:
Infinera announced a metro deployment for its TM-series gear in a far flung market. Paratus Telecom is using the equipment to supply WDM connectivity services in Windhoek, the capital of Namibia. The TM series of course comes from the company’s Transmode purchase over the summer, and for this particular contract they worked with South African local partner Adcomtec.
Alcatel-Lucent and BT are busy with a new technology trial in the UK. They are putting G.fast through its paces in north-eastern England, bringing 330Mbps to some 2000 homes in and around Gosforth in NewCastle-upon-Tyne. It’s the next step up from a smaller project in Hethersett in Norfolk. 330Mbps over copper is well beyond what they used to say was possible, but the clamor for fiber isn’t likely to let up.
Rumors have swirled around Juniper all week. The latest has the router giant hiring Goldman Sachs to help it go private. The company has not enjoyed the public eye over the last several years, and has been under steady pressure from activist investors to do something. Going private would certainly be something, and certainly would have its attractions. It’s hard to look long term as a public company in a sector that is so dependent on the current industry capex weather shifts.
And EMC appears to have a suitor, assuming the debt markets are friendly enough. Dell is said to be working with Silver Lake on a $50B acquisition of the storage giant and 80% owner of VMware. Silver Lake helped Dell itself go private a few years ago, and since then the company has been less focused on consumers and more on the enterprise. A purchase of EMC would make some sense and take it much further down that path, but the integration would be a huge project.
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Categories: Mergers and Acquisitions · Telecom Equipment
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I find this to be interesting since it feels almost like an addition by subtraction transaction. Here me out … why on earth would Dell want yet another storage vendor? EMC was a great company … operative word was. Today, its overpriced bloated h/w provider with some very good subsidiaries it owns in the federation. If Dell is smart, they take out EMC, consolidate the daylights out of the overbloated org structures and yield significant operational synergies from the mash up. With any luck they stream line the former EMC business by 80% and save good enterprise customers. But the real gold is vmware and virtrustream. Those are two unique and important pieces. So they “add” EMC, “subtract” all they can from the merger and take two important golden nuggets forward in vmware and vitrustream. What will be the real interesting story is whether or not Dell does anything strategic with vmware. Perhaps Secureworks gets combined with vitrustream and the very capable leadership team at VS and vmware is used to enhance Dells value prop end to end in software domain with its customers. At least lets hope thats what silver lake and michael dell are thinking …
Something tells me that Dell isn’t thinking along the same path as you… 🙂