News

First ABE | November 18, 2017

Cisco:  Cisco this week posted very solid earnings.  While on the surface it didn’t look that good (flat revenue and earnings) is was much better than Wall Street expected so the stock went up.  Shares of Cisco rallied on Thursday after they wowed Wall Street with better-than-expected earnings.

Cisco said Wednesday that fiscal first-quarter adjusted earnings were 61 cents a share, flat vs. a year earlier, with revenue falling 2% to $12.1 billion.

Cisco also said it expects 1 percent to 3 percent year-over-year revenue growth next quarter, the first inkling of an increase after 8 quarters of declines. The stock rose about 5 percent Thursday after about a dozen Wall Street analysts listed in FactSet raised their earnings expectations for Cisco going forward.

Earlier this year Cisco stepped further into the Unified Communications and Telephony space with its acquisition of BroadSoft (BSFT).

Mitel:  Mitel just this quarter closed its $530 million acquisition of ShoreTel.

The purchase marks one of the largest unified communications mergers in years, creating the No. Two (#2) player in the global UCaaS market.  The UC market is transitioning to the cloud and there are very few on-premises UC vendors left.

The new combined company is laser-focused on winning more deals and taking share from its two biggest UC cloud rivals: 8×8 and RingCentral.

The acquisition will give Mitel annual sales of more than $1.31 billion, according to Ottawa, Canada-based Mitel, and will double Mitel’s UCass revenue to $263 million. The company is also targeting $60 million in cost synergies by 2019.

Ribbon:  Sonus has put the final touches on its merger with Genband, renaming the combined company under the new Ribbon Communications brand.

The name Ribbon is meant to reflect the suite of real-time communications software solutions that the combined company brings to market, according to press materials

Ribbon brings together Sonus’ strengths in real-time virtualization, cloud-based SIP, security, and 4G/voice-over-LTE solutions with Genband’s strengths in network, UC, mobility, and embedded communications/communications platform as a service

Avaya:  Avaya has filed paperwork earlier this month with the intention of coming out of Chapter 11 in December.   They have announced a new Board of Directors and plan to issue stock on one of the stock exchanges.

It appears most of the debt holders are in agreement with the restructured company’s plan on the debt with a key court date for possible approval at the end of November.