The ever entertaining Bob Cringely has an interesting take on the fact that Avaya and Alltel are under the same figurative roof:
Alltel, a national mobile phone company, was acquired by Silverlake and TPG Capital, two private equity funds. Avaya, a maker of IP telephony systems for business, was also acquired by the same Silverlake and TPG Capital.
And here:
Their Alltel mobile phone network will provide VoIP to Avaya PBX’s, effectively creating for businesses (at first) a PSTN bypass. Then the same people will provide Vonage-type phone service over local broadband using Avaya PBX’s, creating yet another PSTN bypass.
I don’t see why Alltel needs to own the PBX vendor to make this happen, I would have thought that owning Wayport of T-Mobile would make more sense however the fact that the fund managers need to come up with big benefits of the privatisation may make this compelling. You can read more of Bob’s column here.
