Unified Communications Featured Article

Unified Communications Bolstered by Sangoma Acquisition

By Steve Anderson
Contributing Writer

There's commonly something to be said for acquiring a partner. After all, the two separate firms work well together, a development proven over long hours of actually working together. It's no different in the unified communications (UC) field, where recently, Sangoma (News - Alert) announced that it was acquiring the telecom assets of partner firm Micro Advantage Inc. The deal just recently went effective, and with it, Sangoma gains quite a bit of new power in the field.

Micro Advantage offers a variety of UC tools, including a cloud public branch exchange (PBX (News - Alert)) system that's actually based on earlier offerings from Sangoma. This is a positive reflection on Sangoma itself; when it began, it was a single-product operation, and it has since expanded its lineup to offer a host of new tools and options, all of which are geared toward providing the fullest range of UC solutions to solve a company's needs.  Reports suggest Sangoma paid an initial sum of $350,000 for the company, with a set of retention and earn-out options that combined could add another $300,000 to the total.

Now, with Micro Advantage on its side, and its own development efforts reaching fruition, Sangoma can offer a host of new options. Ranging from session initiation protocol (SIP) trunking tools, PBX options, a complete slate of hardware options in various IP phones and plenty more, Sangoma can prove a one-source supplier for many common communications needs. It's also been working aggressively to provide more “recurring revenue” options to the business, specifically subscription-based materials where users are coming back month after month to enjoy powerful services and bring revenue along.

Basically, it looks like Sangoma has made a great deal here. It's not only adding on a line of new products and services to its roster, but it's also bringing these on from a former partner in the field that understands Sangoma's own lineup so well that it built its own products based on said lineup. That makes it an excellent target for addition, and gives Sangoma room to go back to current clients with new options, including options that could produce that recurring revenue.

Sangoma's purchase may have just bought it a whole new prominence in the field, and that's good news for the company in the long term. Recurring revenue should be the goal of any business, and though it's not always easy to produce, achieving such a goal is worth doing.