re: Ericsson's Svanberg Could 'Bolt On'Why would Ericsson want to buy this company? The article mentions that the Marconi acquisition did nothing to get them a foothold in North America. Entrisphere is going to deliver neither a Tier 1 carrier, nor a N. American foothold. Tellabs would get them plenty of face time with VZ, but given issues around rolling out BPON (and TLAB's GPON perpetually "around the corner"), I'm not sure that it is the type of face time anyone would want.
re: Ericsson's Svanberg Could 'Bolt On'oops... hit the return button too quickly.
Why not Occam which sells for about 2.8x revenues in the public market? They have done a terrific job growing revenues rapidly even though for much of that time they were severely hampered by a small balance sheet and large operating losses.
Calix entered the scene earlier, and has a bigger presence at some of the larger independents, but Occam has the better platform as well as an endorsement from Cisco. With a bigger company behind it, I tend to think that growth could acclerate.
re: Ericsson's Svanberg Could 'Bolt On'It seems that Calix will have about $150mm in revenues in 2006, so a $2.1b price tag implies about 12-13x revenues which is a ludicrous price tag.
re: Ericsson's Svanberg Could 'Bolt On'Ericsson interest will shift to other areas instead of access loop since they already have DSLAM/MSAN product line (fr Marconi acquisition). Note they also have GPON in their lab for demo. Thus I guess they will target next acquisitions for: - P2P media software, SIP applications? - IPTV middleware, i.e. Kasenna - Service assurance/quality measurement tools, i.e. Agama - residential gateway, video codec? - metro WDM?
re: Ericsson's Svanberg Could 'Bolt On'What were the broadband assets that Ericsson picked up from Marconi, especially in the U.S.? I thought that all of the DISC*S equipment (aka Reltec) had been picked up by AFC (now TLAB). Ericsson is a wireless-only company in the U.S. as far as I've seen. The RBOC infrastruce from an access perspective is pretty much exclusively Alcatel, especially with the newly formed Alcatel-Lucent. I think that Ericsson should consider Adtran if they want any existing presence in the RBOC space. These guys have been used in some of the smaller applications, but at least it would be a beach head, and I don't believe that the associated "face time" would all be negative.
re: Ericsson's Svanberg Could 'Bolt On' The reasons that you have for Occam probably apply to Calix. Calix has probably have tighter connections with Cisco than Occam would have (see Carl Russo, Ajaib Bhadare). In terms of better platform, highly doubt it. I don't see how either Calix or Occam would have a major differentiation with an ethernet box, which is built with similar off-the-shelf products.
On the other hand, I agree with seven on the difficulty of going for a substantial exit in the tier-2 telecom network.
How will they ever get a tier-1 account among juggernauts such as alcatel-lucent, siemens, ericsson, cisco, etc???
Why would those companies (cisco, ericsson, etc.) buy Calix? Product: probably not Customer: major percent of spending is done by tier-1 accounts. Does it worth to pay that much to expand customer base to less-spending, tier-2 accounts? Competitive: I haven't heard Calix being a major threat to those companies in tier-1 accounts. Hence, I don't see this as the reason.
Yes, that would be a reasonable assumption