Featured Article from Unified Communications Headsets

Atos to Acquire Unify for $371 Million

By Casey Houser
Contributing Writer

Atos Origin, one of the largest IT service companies in France and all of Europe, has announced that it will soon acquire Unify, a developer of unified communications software.

A report from Network World (News - Alert) about the coming acquisition says the deal will land for $371 million. This will make for one of the biggest stories of the year – up with Mitel’s acquisition of Aastra (News - Alert) and Mavenir, Cisco of Tropo, and RingCentral of Glip, Network World posited. Atos will now throw itself into the world of unified communications by gaining Unify’s (News - Alert) Circuit communications and collaboration software.

The deal is being called a “win” for both companies. In the first place, it is clear that Atos, a successful IT services business, can expand its expertise with a dedicated communications platform. For Unify, this acquisition may be seen as positive because it could give the Circuit platform some leverage with businesses hesitant to make the switch to the cloud.

Circuit debuted only about a year ago. Before then, Unify (at the time known as Siemens Enterprise (News - Alert) Network) handled the communications brand OpenScape. Now it is trying to move OpenScape customers to Unify. That transition, however, means moving many companies to the cloud, which requires more than a handful of professional services and support. Atos’s experience as a service provider can help manage those transitions and allow Circuit to perform better than it has in its freshman year.

According to Network World, Atos will also take over the liability for its worker’s pensions that, although not a significant problem in the present, could reveal some headaches down the line. Atos should have enough money that it can handle that burden and still remain in the black.

The growth of unified communications, as a whole, is rising, and its subset of cloud-based services could show the unified communications-as-a-service market experience a compound annual growth rate of up to 28 percent through the end of the decade.

This is good news for all companies involved in the market. Immediately, it is good news for Atos’s prospects and the future of the Circuit communications software. The cloud-based communications market’s time has come, so it also time for the big players to push for dominance.