Lucent to Acquire Telica

Lucent Technologies has agreed to acquire Telica, a privately held, provider of VoIP communications systems for service providers, for approximately $295 million in stock and options, plus additional employee-related cash payments.

Headquartered in Marlboro, Mass., Telica has been a recipient of numerous honors, including Internet Telephony magazine's Product of the Year award and was named one of New England's Fastest Growing Technology companies in September 2003 by Deloitte & Touche/Ernst & Young.

Telica products include the award-winning Telica Plexus 9000 Media Gateway, PLUS Signaling Gateway, and PLUS Media Gateway Controller. These products will be marketed and sold as part of Lucent’s Accelerate portfolio, which was announced last November.

According to Janet Davidson, President Integrated Network Solutions at Lucent, the transaction is about more than Voice over IP. "It's about next-generation multimedia services over IP," said Davidson. "It's about revenue-producing voice, video, and data blended over IP, over wireline and wireless, to customers at their convenience."

This acquisition further underscores the transition to next-generation Voice over IP that is currently underway.

This acquisition -- Lucent's first since 2000 -- should allow the telecom equipment maker to deliver large-scale VoIP solutions to the carrier market that they serve.

"Telica has a proven VoIP portfolio and has already sold its systems to more than 50 customers in a wide range of applications and networks," said Davidson. "Their products give us a more complete, highly scalable VoIP solution and a flexible, open architecture to respond to the many different approaches our customers are taking with the evolution of their networks."

Telica has about 250 employees worldwide, with the vast majority at its headquarters in Massachusetts. Telica founder and CEO John St. Amand will remain with Lucent and oversee Telica as it becomes part of Lucent's INS business.

"In joining Lucent, we become part of a world-class networking leader with deep knowledge and relationships in the service provider industry," said Telica founder and CEO John St. Amand. "I am proud of what Telica has accomplished to this point, deploying more than 3 million ports and supporting about 4 billion minutes of use per month on our PLUS systems. As part of Lucent, we will be able to combine our strengths and our industry leading products with Lucent's broad portfolio of products, services and technology to become the leading provider of VoIP solutions to service providers throughout the world."

"We have been focused on strengthening our business in a number of areas where we see the potential for market growth, including VoIP, metro optical, broadband access and mobile high-speed data," said Bill O'Shea, Lucent's executive vice president of Corporate Strategy and Business Development. "With market conditions stabilizing, we felt the time was right to make this strategic acquisition to complement our internal development at Bell Labs. Telica is a great match in the VoIP space with its advanced, flexible architecture and its ability to serve wireline and wireless customer needs with a single solution."