GENBAND Buys NSN Media Gateway Assets

In its latest move to rule the media gateway market, GENBAND today announced the acquisition of Nokia Siemens Networks’ SURPASS hiG fixed line trunking media gateway product line and a five-year OEM deal to be NSNs’ preferred supplier of those gateways for the global fixed network market.

“This is another validation of us becoming the king of media gateways,” said Mehmet Balos, executive vice president and chief marketing officer at GENBAND, which declined to provide financial details of the acquisition.

GENBAND, which is No.1 in North America and No. 2 globally in the media trunking gateway space, on Friday took possession of NSNs’ hiG operations. Through the deal GENBAND took ownership of NSNs’ location in Brazil, which houses around 70 employees. The acquisition also gives GENBAND a slate of top-tier customers including AT&T, Cablevision, DT, KPN of Holland, Oi of Brazil, T-Com, Telefonica, Shaw Communications, and many other providers.

“We are in 30 of the top 100 service providers as is, as GENBAND,” said Balos. “Now this adds additional marquee accounts in the top 100 service providers.”

Of course, many of the customers GENBAND gets via the NSN deal are non-domestic providers, said Balos. “When you are becoming a mid-size to large company you need to play outside of North America,” he said, indicating that allows a company to offer more consistent returns and growth despite any seasonal or economic market fluctuations.

While GENBAND had small-, medium- and high-density media gateways already in its portfolio before the NSN deal, Balos said the small and medium media gateways it gets from the acquisition come with this attractive base of customers and are “more targeted at international” so “there’s no product overlap, per se.” However, he added that “we will go to a product realization/rationalization going forward in the next six months to a year” and “we may just look into the migration of the platforms” going forward.

GENBAND has been connected with NSN for some time. The North American operations of what is now NSN (Nokia and Siemens merged their service provider operations in 2006) has been a reseller of GENBAND products since 2004. And in 2006 GENBAND acquired the DCO business of Siemens Networks LLC.

But NSN is just one of a strong and growing stable of channel partners GENBAND has established to bring its products to market. Alcatel-Lucent is the largest of GENBAND’s channel partners; others include Motorola (which it’s working with on multiple femtocell field trials), Nortel in North America, ZTE in China and other APAC markets, and additional “leading equipment suppliers to be announced in the next four to eight weeks.”

While GENBAND has been focused on building its product portfolio and customer base through acquisitions from NSN, Siemens and Tekelec, the company also has had impressive organic growth. Balos said GENBAND plans to continue expanding its homegrown development efforts.

“Now we have four R&D centers in operation, in South America, North America and Asia,” said Balos. “So that’s really a nice thing. Sixty percent of our human resources are in research, development and engineering, that’s a very significant thing for a company our size with about 500 employees now. We are investing in innovation.”

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