Telcordia's Chapter Ends: Waiting For the Sequel

Now that the Ericsson acquisition of Telcordia has quietly come to completion, you might ask yourself why an American company didn't acquire Telcordia, a company with some of the greatest intellectual property in the communications industry. But then you'd have to ask yourself, "Who?"

IBM is one of the few American software companies with the resources to have considered it, but their on-again/off-again partnership with Telcordia didn't amount to much over the years. Besides, IBM sees telecom as just another vertical market--and not the most exciting one at that.

Oracle had the means and the appetite for an acquisition of this scale, but the companies have little in common from a platform perspective and Oracle may not have had the patience to deal with the more cerebral approach of Telcordia.

That the list is short says more about the state of the American software sector than it does about this particular acquisition. It's just something to keep in mind when you hear someone spouting off about American superiority. That Lucent is now a French company and Telcordia  now a Swedish company can be unnerving to some, but on the bright side, the international makeup of most of the players in this industry is a marvelous thing. Only in art, business and science do people ignore as much as they can the political and ideological divisions governments impose on their people. Real people, going about their real lives transcend these divides.

Ericsson says in some of its promotional material that it is helping create a networked society. I believe the continued globalization of such companies can lead to something even bigger: a networked civilization.

As for the down-to-earth take on this acquisition, we must think strictly in terms of business and in terms of the communications industry. And the bottom line is this: Telcordia needed this. It has been the expressed goal of its CEO and Board of Directors for a long time. The company's history and its future ambitions made for strange bedfellows and was a difficult balancing act to pull off and a difficult business model to sustain. 

But also, the industry needed to see Telcordia survive. The company is not only historically significant, which probably doesn't count for much in the long run, but it is one of the few places you can go where people still understand the linkages between what will one day be yesterday's communications network and what will one day be tomorrow's, because we still exist in a place in between. And there is much that was learned in the building of the 9th Wonder of the World that shouldn't all be lost in the building of the 10th.

Besides, Telcordia isn't just about yesterday's network. According to most analysts who follow the company they have some fine, multi-vendor technology for new-generation networks. This can only help Ericsson overcome any latent fears--which all hardware vendors must--that it cannot provide multi-vendor solutions.

It has long been said about Telcordia that its greatest assets was its people. A lot of company leaders blow this smoke at their company picnics, but in Telcordia's case this smoke came from outside the company, which pretty much makes it true. And as some of its new products struggled to find a place in the market, by default it became even more true. However, as part of the bigger entity of Ericsson, Telcordia may find more opportunity in more markets around the world than it could have before.

It will be interesting to see how all those big brains at Telcordia blend with the big brains at Ericsson, because Ericsson is not lacking in brainpower itself--or confidence. If all those big brains don't get in the way of each other--although that they are stuck inside fallible human heads makes that quite likely--the industry could benefit as much as Telcordia and Ericsson.  

E-mail me at tmcelligott@vpico.com or click on the comment button below.