Last night, the Ditech dinner revealed a bit more about its acquisition of Jasomi Networks, yet another SBC (Session Border Controller) company to be acquired recently (following Kagoor, which got snapped up by Juniper).  The final price tag was $20 million ($13 million in cash and $7 million in convertible notes), which might seem a bit underpriced compared to Kagoor (which fetched $67.5 million).  On the Wednesday analyst/press dinner event, the answer given to me about this difference in valuation was pretty much the same as what was quoted on a LightReading article, namely, that Kagoor was funded by VCs, whereas Jasomi got most of its capital from angel investors.  The transaction is expected to close by the end of the month.

The rationale behind the acquisition is to complement the PVP Packet Voice Processor product (an offering that was talked about at the Spring VON show).  The PVP is expected to begin generating revenues in calendar Q1 of 2006.  One idea is to develop the PVP into an SBC, or even perhaps as a media gateway.  In order to shorten the time-to-market, the company chose to purchase rather than to develop such an offering in-house.  Jasomi's 23 employees are mainly based in Canada (the HQ for product development is in Calgary), with a few others working out of Mountain View, CA. 

Another possibility is parlaying Jasomi's SBC competency in the IMS space, albeit thus far Jasomi's biggest customers have been in the enterprise market (versus carriers) - can that be scaled up or is more development needed?  There were rumors from my Wall Street connections that sometime ago, Cisco had tested Jasomi gear in Singapore and passed up on the opportunity, but a good chunk of time has passed since then.  Jasomi's current partners include the likes of Microsoft, Broadsoft, Sylantro, RADVision, and General Bandwidth, among others.

The million dollar question now is: which will be the next SBC vendor to be bought?  I will be willing to make a couple of bets: one is Nextone (since au contraire of vendors such as Acme Packet or Netrake, Nextone's solution can be put on a blade - and hence be a part of the IBM Blade Center / IMS ecosystem).  The other one?  Ditech itself - since the company could be positioning itself to be bought at some point in the future by an even bigger player.

Note: Jeff Pulver was a guest speaker at the Ditech dinner and gave a great keynote.  I have posted a couple of photos of the event in my photo album.

Nortel execs take note: Siemens joins other vendors in exiting markets in which the company underperforms (other recent examples: Lucent, exiting the GSM business, or Ericsson, which left the CDMA market for the most part, except for emerging opportunities such as CDMA450).  In Siemens' example, the Munich-based multi-national finally unloaded its wireless handset unit to Taiwanese vendor BenQ.  As reported here before, Siemens' quest to unload its underperforming mobile phone division has been going on for a long time.  The transaction, expected to close in September 2005, calls for Siemens to purchase $61.4 million (€ 50 million) of BenQ stock, in addition to taking a $429.5 million (€ 350 million) charge.  The division's workforce (totaling roughly 6,000) will remain in Munich.  Siemens and BenQ combined in 2004 to amass about 10% of the overall global market (4th in the world, behind Samsung).  Geographically speaking, the deal makes sense, with BenQ being strong in APAC and Siemens showing strength in Europe and Latin America (including Brazil).