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Nortel Acquires Pingtel

August 15th, 2008

Nortel has bought Pingtel from mobility firm Bluesocket. Nortel hopes the open source IP PBX division will have better luck moving forward.

Financial terms of the deal remain confidential 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 Massachusetts facility. Pingtel and Nortel have already been working together for a while on OEM SIP based enterprise solutions.

Pingtel’s sipX open source IP PBX software is highly regarded for its ability to scale to support up to 10,000 users and 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.

We think this is an interesting move and we remember when Pingtel produced one of the earliest SIP phones called Xpressa which had a knob on the side to scroll through the phone book and later they moved away from hardware to focus on software and sipX development. In 2007, the company was purchased by Bluesocket. We like the way Nortel has made a move to an OpenSource system but has avoided the Asterisk race, it will be interesting to see how the Asterisk community reacts to such a big player in the Telecoms marketplace making a move into their area.

See the Nortel Press release here.

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Nortel Acquires Pingtel

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