Aricent

As Zippy says quite well in this article, "Normally, when a new company makes its debut, Yours Truly will cross his fingers and wish good luck upon the company’s uncertain future. That won’t be necessary with Aricent, which comes out of the gate as a market leader in communications software, with 125 software products and already enjoying over $300 million in annual revenue."

I think Aricent who you may know as Hughes Software Systems or as part of Flextronics International is poised to do well. Although I haven’t heard from them in a short while I know they have been active in PR and marketing during the telecom meltdown years and the reaction to the company at TMC’s Internet Telephony events was favorable. I am looking forward to catching up with company execs and now seems like a great time. Thankfully Zippy had a chance to have a briefing while I was in Lisbon.

My reasoning for thinking Aricent is in the right space at the right time is laser focus on pure-play communications software product and services.

Furthermore the company is a good size at about 6,700 employees worldwide in 25 offices.

To get a sense for the business drivers here check out this quote from Aricent’s Chief Strategy Officer and executive vice president, Sanjay Dhawan.

"Communications used to be very simple," Dhawan said. "There used to be two different parallel networks, the PSTN and a data network. On the PSTN side, you pick up the phone and make a phone call; SS7 signaling the takes place to connect your call to the appropriate party. On the data side, a similar, parallel network used to exist, with some basic routing and switching technologies to move emails, do file transfers, or otherwise move data from a source to a destination. Today, however, things are very complex in the sense that there are mega-convergence drivers appearing among various different technologies involving voice, video and data. It’s taking place on handsets, desktops, and home PCs. As a result, a new backend infrastructure is being built, which in turn creates more and more complexity on the communications software side."

He is right on and communications is more complicated than ever. It is getting more and more challenging for companies to deal with all the technology coming down the pike. This all has to be done of course while dealing with the technologies and of course acronyms of the past.

Everything in the new converged world has to work together as one. IPTV, IMS, FMC, WiFi telephony, cell phones, laptops. All of it.

Now that the communications market is red hot I think the timing for Aricent spinning off is perfect and I see an IPO in the next few years as a real possibility as the communications space is once again seeing unprecedented spending. Most of this spending of course is in the service provider market which plays right into Aricent’s sweet spot.

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