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Nortel acquires Pingtel

By Bo Gowan August 13, 2008 11:31 am EDT

This morning Nortel issued this press release announcing the acquisition of Pingtel. This acquisition strengthens Nortel’s efforts in providing an open-source unified communications solution.

Back in April, I blogged about Nortel’s new open-source UC solution for SMBs, the SCS 500. The SCS 500 is based on sipXecs (not Asterisk), which is a SIP-based open-source IP-PBX platform for VoIP. To-date, Nortel has contributed more than 300 new applications and features to sipXecs, helping transform its use into a full-featured unified communications platform capable of integrating VoIP, instant messaging, presence, on-demand audio/video conferencing, and unified messaging.

So how does Pingtel relate to all this?

Well it turns out that Pingtel leads the sipXecs open-source project. In addition, Nortel was already a minority stakeholder to Pingtel, and had an existing OEM agreement in place to license their SIPx IP PBX Open Source software for use in the SCS 500.

Under the terms of the agreement, Nortel will acquire the key assets of Pingtel from Bluesocket, including intellectual property, R&D capabilities and its senior management. Pingtel employees will be integrated into Nortel’s Billerica, Massachusetts facilities. Nortel is not releasing financial terms of the deal.

While the Nortel SCS 500 is targeted directly to SMBs with 50-300 users, the press release makes it clear that Nortel is looking to possibly expand it’s open-source UC focus to all enterprises. The press release states that “In the near term, Pingtel will bring critical software elements” to the SCS 500, but also that “Nortel will use the software capabilities to further its leadership to deliver unified communications solutions to enterprise customers of all segments.”

To be clear, Nortel is not acquiring Pingtel in order to make sipXecs a Nortel-only solution. While Nortel does hope to accelerate its own solution with this deal, the desire is to accelerate the development of a global open source ecosystem based on sipXecs. Martin Steinmann, senior vice president, marketing at Pingtel (who now joins Nortel) said that the acquisition by Nortel “is the next logical step that will further accelerate adoption of the technology and solutions on a global basis.”

Anyone have any opinions on this acquisition?  Of Pingtel?  Can Nortel be a credible player in the open-source space?

Categories: Corporate / Executives, Enterprise, Nortel News, VoIP / Unified Communictions
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Comments

  1. This is really good news!
    As an open source hobbyist and former tester of sipXecs wan to congratulates Nortel for doing this very wise move and welcome Pingtel’s employees to Nortel.

    Mariano from Nortel Argentina

    August 14th, 2008 at 1:37 pm by Mariano Stokle

  2. Personally, I agree with this move to acquire PingTel although I am not certain as to how well the Nortel partner model and customer base will support these efforts. The major distractor from this effort is the huge Microsoft push that NT has made over the last 24 months with OCS interoperability. Therefore, it seems to me that once again, Nortel has not made any big bets here, and they are still playing in as many sandboxes as they can at the moment versus focusing on a single, bold direction for anything.

    – Guinness

    August 18th, 2008 at 2:35 pm by Guinness

  3. My feeling is that the Nortel aqisition of Pingtel will and is ligitimizing commercial Open Source telephony, takingit out of the science project category. My immediate question is how Nortel will market these solutions and will they get any reseller traction in an Aserisk dominated market.

    Although there is growing interest in the SCS500 among Nortel resellers, what are the benefits to Digium, Fonanity, and other resellers?

    The Asterisk and other Open Source Telephony vendors culture is dominated by an approch that is completely different than the major telephony vendors such as Nortel, Avaya, and Cico that bring a lot of propritary bagage along with them.

    My big question is how is Nortel going to tranistion to an open source based model and culture and can they. Will they open up the SCS500 and other Nortel|Pingtel solutions for the traditional open source developers in the same way Digium|Asterisk has in terms of the customers expectations as to an Open Source Telephony solution?

    What is is the competitve advantage they can provide over Digium SwitchVox, Fonality, and other leading Open Source Telephony vendors, the open source telephony community and to our resellers? Will Nortel be as open?

    I’m watching Nortel, but I don’t have high hopes as their ability to integrate into the open source telephony based community pioneed by Digium|Asterisk. I think the revamped management team at Nortel has aimed at the right moving target but is tway short as to the delivey, just another propritary solution in an open market. I hate saying that because Nortel has always been one of my favorite companies.

    Moe Schwartz - Tedchnical Director Westcon

    September 8th, 2008 at 9:46 am by MoeWestcon

  4. Having looked at a few of related blogs and articles, it seems that while Asterisk in its many flavors is focused on a simple IP PBX replacement, Nortel’s SCS500 is focused on more of a pure Unified Communications approach. I’ve also learned that although SCS500 is open source based, it represents more than 300 contributions FROM Nortel into the open source community; effectively culminating in the best of both worlds. It makes sense in my mind; flexibility and accelerated development using open source, but doing so in combination with Nortel’s expertise and experience in telephony/multimedia. Also think this includes a ton of verification and interoperability testing of the different releases.

    I think I agree with most of the analysts on this one… SCS500 is a pretty big leap forward in Nortel’s Unified Communications strategy… its a software and services based approach that complements its existing portfolio and it shows they’re moving with the market. When you consider they already have their own products, plus several that integrate with IBM and Microsoft- open source is simply another pillar. I’m also aware of several companies (ie. 3rd party developers outside Nortel) with supplemental applications- which means its got to be pretty open (since it just launched a few months ago).

    One last thing… I just came across a webinar coming up on SCS500 itself, which includes some comparisons of SCS500 & Digium and other “competitors”… link included if anyone’s interested…

    http://www2.nortel.com/go/events_detail.jsp?cat_id=-8005&oid=100244507&block=8&locale=en-US

    Iancol Inmark

    September 9th, 2008 at 2:41 pm by Chris

  5. I want to look at buying some Pingtel software.

    There is no information on how to purchase on the website. I filled in a form on the site, and got a reply (with the Bluesocket name in it), with no information on how to purchase. I called the number on the SIPxchange ECS datasheet, and got Bluesocket, the former owners. I called 1-800-Pingtel, and got a voice response menu that either dumped me into voice mail, did a dial-by-name that couldn’t find any names, or, if I pressed 0, said “goodbye” and hung up on me.

    I called Nortel, and no one there knows much. I’m hoping for a call back, maybe… because I have to go into a meeting and need some cost information.

    I have an idea: Possibly Pingtel could get a unified communication system, that would let their sales people respond to inquiries such as mine? Does anyone know where they might get such a thing?

    October 9th, 2008 at 4:23 pm by Evan Yares

  6. With Nortel’s acquisition of Pingtel, the Pingtel SIPxchange ECS product (based on the global open source project from SIPfoundry) is no a longer commercially available offering. The Pingtel website is in the process of being updated to reflect this.

    However, if you’re interested in this product, I’d encouraged to learn more about Nortel’s Software Communication System 500 (SCS500), UC solution for SMBs based on the same open source foundation. We officially launched SCS500 back in April, and you can read more here: http://tinyurl.com/3paynn

    October 15th, 2008 at 2:06 pm by Bo Gowan

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