2009 emerging VoIP merger and acquisition trends

Consolidation for the sake of consolidation 

If you buy into Dialogic Nick Jensen's speech at a NYC analyst event this spring, carriers don't want to deal with vendors with revenues of less than $100 million dollars; $200 to $400 million is better. Some companies are going to get big. 

Content delivery networks (CDNs) 

CDNs need cheap pipes and provide recurring revenues. Plus, there's the whole IP peering thing. Could AT&T or Verizon make a play for a CDN? Verizon has purchased ISPs in the past, so a CDN acquisition would be a logical next step. 

If you want to think big, Google and Akamai would make a great paring. Would it be a practical one? Don't know. Would it result in some anti-trust noises? Oh, yes! 

Cloud computing 

Amazon, Microsoft and Google all "get" clouds. And we're talking Microsoft here, who has spent hundreds of millions of dollars building out massive data centers to support clouds. Cloud technology can support everything from simple web hosting to call center applications. 

HD Technology 

Moving out of the "me too" legacy 56Kbps landline slowboat into high-quality audio is where the industry is going.

Hosted services and/or SaaS 

Repeat after me: Monthly recurring revenues are good. Monthly recurring revenues are good.

We expect to see a bunch of complementary buys in 2009 involving applications companies wanting to offer their own champagne through their own storefronts via a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. Or, where they see synergies that include both technology (see below) and SaaS. Logitech's buy of Sightspeed is one of those two-for-one deals, assuming that Logitech is comfy with running services as well as selling mice, microphones, webcams and keyboards. 

Anyone who has half a brain is going to want to buy themselves some recurring revenue businesses. The challenge is having a full brain and being able to mange the dichotomy of being both a basic product company and a services company, because you likelyend up competing with customers. 

Video 

Video compression, HD video, video delivery, multi-party video conferencing, video transcoding, mobile video, "all screen" video between TV, PC, and mobile devices, these are a few of our favorite things.  We're talking hard problems to balance off compute power, bandwidth availability and quality of experience for the end user.