by Philbert Shih, theWHIR.com
June 1, 2005 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Hosting of VoIP services has received growing interest from Web hosting companies looking to expand their product and service offerings in an effort to generate revenue and attract and retain customers. But being able to offer VoIP services through a service provider delivery platform is not a capability that is widespread amongst the industry’s leading automation solution providers.
With this in mind, hosting automation software developer Ensim (www.ensim.com) moved to add these capabilities to its arsenal with Tuesday’s acquisition of TeleGea (www.telegea.com), a provider of service delivery solutions for hosted VoIP services.
“It accelerates our business plan by multiple years,” Sandip Gupta, president and CEO of Ensim, told the Web Host Industry Review. “We were going to do this by ourselves, but having a company that already has market traction, has domain knowledge, has product and solutions that they are already selling, surely helps us tremendously.”
Ensim had been eyeing VoIP as a key emerging hosted service, says Gupta. “We have been looking to expand into other areas, and VoIP was one of the areas which we were seriously evaluating.”
TeleGea would have been one of Ensim’s competitors, but since the same venture capital firm backed both companies, it was easy to get a conversation going. The two parties soon found that they shared significant common ground. According to Gupta, both companies hold a broader vision of a converged hosted services delivery model. “Based on the common vision, common thinking and similar solutions, it made a lot sense for us to join hands.”
“This is an important milestone in our history,” says Gupta. “It uniquely positions us in the market to provide overall solutions for our customers and we also leapfrog our competition in a big way.”
TeleGea’s technology is designed to streamline and optimize the delivery and management of hosted VoIP services. Ensim says acquiring TeleGea accelerates its own entry into the fast-growing VoIP space, a logical expansion to its portfolio because of the growing convergence of hosted voice, data, messaging and collaboration services. “There is a tremendous drive for convergence in the service provider industry,” says Gupta. Ensim also consulted with its own customers, who expressed a strong interest in hosted VoIP services, says Gupta.
The merger will also create numerous cross- and upselling opportunities. Ensim’s hosting provider customers will now have a solution for rolling out and managing VoIP services. And TeleGea’s approximately 20 service provider customers (VoIP pureplays, broadband service providers or local exchange carriers), some which already offer shared Web and email hosting, will have access to a full range of hosting automation solutions.
Gupta says the union with TeleGea will eventually create a software provider whose value proposition would be that of a single platform for the delivery of hosted services. Although Gupta says its customers will ultimately dictate how the company integrates the technology, he believes that the future may see a single, fully integrated solution.
Gupta is optimistic that the service provider market remains ripe with potential as many still deploy in-house automation solutions. He believes that as the market matures, service providers will look to commercial solutions when they realize they want to focus more time on customer acquisition and servicing, versus building the backend infrastructure. This is further fueled by the momentum of convergence and the evolving service delivery model, which is leaning towards single-source suppliers of communications services.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The new company will operate under the Ensim brand with Gupta continuing as president and CEO. Steven Domenikos, CEO of TeleGea, will act as a strategic business advisor to Ensim, and other members of TeleGea’s management team will be given leadership positions. Adding TeleGea brings Ensim’s headcount to approximately 175 employees and adds an operations base in Waltham, Massachusetts to Ensim’s Sunnyvale, California and Pune, India locations.
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