Avaya Acquires RADVISION

Avaya Inc. has announced its agreement to acquire RADVISION Ltd. at a cost of approximately $230 million. With this acquisition, Avaya expects to provide customers with an integrated and interoperable suite of easy to use HD video conferencing products at an affordable price and improve their Avaya Aura Unified Communications platform.

Upon the conclusion of the acquisition, Avaya will integrate Avaya Aura with RADVISION's enterprise video infrastructure and endpoints, creating a solution made to speed the adoption of video collaboration. As RADVISION's portfolio comes with a variety of video conferencing technology, tools, and expertise, including standards-based applications and open infrastructure endpoints for videoconferencing over a variety of devices, the integrated portfolios will extend Avaya’s video communications while supporting "Bring Your Own Device" initiatives.

“The surprising announcement of Avaya’s acquisition of RADVISION raises a number of questions for current and prospective Avaya customers,” said Marty Parker, Principal Consultant, UniComm Consulting and co-founder UCStrategies. “Immediately, it calls into question the future of the existing Avaya one-X family of unified communications client capabilities. Which client strategy, one-X or Scopia, will prevail? Similarly, how will RADVISION products be integrated with Avaya Aura Conferencing? Perhaps the greatest value of the RADVISION portfolio will come from their very effective Multi-point Conferencing Unit (MCU) functions, which will enable Avaya unified communications and collaboration products to more easily interoperate with video infrastructure that their customers already own, such as Polycom or Tandberg systems. It will be important to watch closely as Avaya works to integrate the RADVISION portfolio while also needing to reverse the RADVISION revenue declines and negative cash flows.”

According to Art M. Rosenberg, UCStrategies UC Expert, "Avaya's acquisition of RADVISION fills a hole in their UC offerings for seamless escalation to video from other forms of communication. In particular, the video offering will support 'mixed mode conferencing,' where individual participants can have a choice for being 'on camera,' see video or and just use voice. In addition to desktop use, this flexibility will be most valuable for Mobile UC that can exploit multimedia smartphones and tablets. However, it will require Avaya to properly integrate RADVISION capabilities."

Rosenberg adds, "Avaya also identified the vertical markets they were targeting for effective use of UC enabled video. These include primarily Health Care and Education, but also benefits in Financial, SME markets and Contact Centers. Clearly, however, they are expecting big payoffs in all applications from mobile devices that will enable video information exchange, as well as ad hoc person-to-person video calls."

"This acquisition makes a lot of sense," says UC Expert Dave Michels. "It really strengthens Avaya's solution and rewards Radvision for some excellent engineering and perseverance. It gives Avaya what it needed to complete its video story, including gateways, systems and endpoints supporting H.323, SIP, and even Microsoft Lync."

The transaction has been approved by the Board of Directors for both companies, and is expected to close within 90 days. RADVISION shareholders will receive $11.85 per share.

For more information, visit www.avaya.com and www.radvision.com.