back to article Mitel nabs Polycom in $1.96bn deal

Elliott Management has struck again: Mitel has agreed to cough $1.96bn for bigger unified comms rival Polycom some months after the activist investor took a stake in both businesses and started the match-making. The $23bn hedge fund took a 6.6 per cent stake in Polycom and 9.6 per cent in Mitel in October and was calling for …

  1. Christian Berger

    This should be a red flag to all customers

    Essentially Mitel already contained an accumulation of products which just don't work very well. They speak very peculiar dialects of SIP which are sometimes just plain wrong. Adding to that it seems as if you can only get those installed by "certified" "technicians" which typically means that you get a salesperson with nothing more than a in depth knowledge of the marketing material.

    Now add the typical business model of a hedge fund to it, and you'll get a company essentially stopping all bug fixing to change marketing related things. The code probably will be bad enough that even changing "Polycom" to "Mitel" in the strings will change the memory enough layout so the buggy code won't work any more.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Skype for Business will kill their business

    My company is already planning on stripping out Polycom kit in 50 offices around the world in favour of Surface Hubs and Skype for Business.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Skype for Business will kill their business

      > My company is already planning on stripping out Polycom kit in 50 offices around the world in favour of Surface Hubs and Skype for Business.

      Really? This is a product which only started shipping a few weeks ago.

      Polycom kit may be old-school but it does actually work for its core purpose of allowing groups of people to talk to each other. Doing echo suppression properly is surprisingly difficult.

      Still - any problems with Surface Hub are "only software" and will be fixed with patches eventually, right?

      I mean, it's not like the Lync client for OSX just hangs up solid in the middle of meetings and needs a full application quit and restart to clear does it? Oh I forgot, it does.

  3. Mpeler
    Mushroom

    Predatory locusts

    When are all of these "activist investors" aka greedy tails wagging the corporate dogs going to be run out of town?

    So-called IP companies, neither intellectual nor creating property are scamming and stripping other companies blind, all for the almighty dollar/pound/euro/Altarian dollar/what-have-you.

    And not doing anyone a nickel's worth of good in the process.

    I suppose their motto would be "Yes Icahn"...

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