Last week Telanetix made the acquisition of AccessLine Communcations to expand their services profile in new directions. Tom Szabo, CEO of Telanetix, held a conference call explaining the firm's rationale in making the acquisition. You can listen to the Telanetix Q2 07 conference call here. Click through to read an article about the purchase.

From Telecommunications Online
by Jim Barthold

The ability to make telepresence part of an IP pitch to small- medium business (SMB) customers was a leading reason why Telanetix is putting up $34.9 million in cash and stock to acquire AccessLine Communications. "At the end of the day, there are customers who have needs. All of them have a voice need and a subset of them have a video need," said Doug Johnson, CEO of AccessLine Communications, which has over 100,000 IP customers.

"There's a compelling argument that voice is an application and so is video." Telanetix has developed a high-end video conferencing system that it has winnowed down to meet the needs of SMBs for about $1,000 a month. "If you were to talk to our competition in the telepresence space, they'd tell you there's no market because the price point can't be met," said Rick Ono, president-COO of Telanetix.

"What's unique about Telanetix is that we've actually spun an SMB product ... a slightly scaled-down version of the full meeting room edition. It gives us the ability to take the same capability, life sized images, all the things that we've put into our higher end products and scale it down a bit and offer it in new ways."

Telanetix says it can take its home built technology, scale it down to middle management conference rooms and offer it to customers within the AccessLine profile. "You'll see a lot of small organizations that are geographically dispersed ... that are using VoIP to communicate between offices ... and now we can go in and offer for $1,000 to see the people as if they're in the same room," he said. That, added Johnson, is why privately held AccessLine will soon be part of Telanetix.

"Although every customer is going to be a voice customer potentially, a subset, and we hope a very large subset, will also be video customers. The problem has been in the industry's ability to execute on it. What's rare with these two companies is that we have a low-cost posture and a high- quality posture ... so we think there's a value prop that's going to work extremely well in the market," he concluded.

via [Telecommunications Online]