Nortel has bought Pingtel, a subsidiary of enterprise mobility firm Bluesocket. The open source IP PBX software/appliance division will hopefully have better luck moving forward.

Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but Nortel will acquire the key assets of Pingtel from Bluesocket, Pingtel's existing OEM relationship with Nortel will be brought in house and Pingtel employees will be integrated into Nortel's Billerica, Mass. facility. Pingtel and Nortel have been working together for a while on SIP-based enterprise solutions.

For the self-described "software-centric" Nortel, the acquisition adds to the company's R&D and software development capabilities.  The new software capabilities are expected to help Nortel deliver unified communications solutions to enterprise customers in all segments.  In the near term, Pingtel software pieces will appear on Nortel's SMB unified communications solution.

Pingtel's sipX open source IP PBX software is highly regarded for its ability to scale to support up to 10,000 users; as an independent entity, Pingtel landed Amazon.com as its largest publicly announced customer. The Amazon.com installation reportedly supports over 5,000 users in a high-availability configuration.  

However, Pingtel's business history has been irregular. The company started out as an IP phone manufacturer, before ditching hardware to focus on software and sipX development. In 2007, the company actively sought a buyer, with Bluesocket finally acquiring them in July 2007.

For more:
- Nortel buys Pingtel [1] announcement

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