Mitel agrees deal to acquire Mavenir, targets IP comms growth

Enterprise communications solutions provider Mitel has confirmed it plans to acquire communications network software vendor Mavenir, after entering a definitive merger agreement. The agreement will see Mitel acquire all outstanding shares of Mavenir common stock in a cash and stock deal valued at approximately $560 million.

The unified communications market is set to boom, with the continued growth of 4G service pervasion, and the array of services expected to be available to consumers and enterprise users is set to widen. With VoLTE, RCS, WebRTC, VoWifi and HD video calling on the rise, and with live rollouts expected to increase in 2015, it appears that Mitel is looking to position itself as one of the holistic vendors in this space, from network services to front end software management.

Mitel’s President and CEO, Rich McBee, said the increasing influence of mobile in the development of tangential technological sectors is the driver for Mitel’s acquisition of Mavenir.

“With wireless adoption of IP and 4G LTE and demand for next gen mobile services ramping quickly, we see a compelling opportunity to capitalize on a major market transition to add a high-growth mobile business to Mitel,” he said. “We believe the combination of Mitel and Mavenir creates a powerful new value proposition for enterprises and mobile service providers, using a common IP technology layer as the foundation for convergence, growth and competitive differentiation.”

Speaking of the transaction, Mavenir CEO Pardeep Kohli concurred with McBee in saying that convergence of IT and telecoms is one of the primary motivators for the convergence of his company with Mitel.

“The move to all-IP LTE mobile networks has created a unique opportunity for service providers to leverage a converged all-IP network to offer feature-rich business and consumer communication services to any device, anywhere, on any access network,” he said. “We believe that the combined company is ideally positioned to capitalize on the trends within the communications industry today; namely, the convergence across enterprise and mobile networks to all-IP technologies, and the transition to cloud-based unified communications telephony and software-defined virtualized infrastructure.”

A statement did confirm that Mavenir will still operate under the same brand, and will become the mobile business division of Mitel.