Mitel Networks Acquires Mavenir Systems for $560 Million

Mitel Networks Corp is buying Mavenir Systems Inc.

The Canadian telecom services provider is acquiring the mobile networking software maker for $560 million. The transaction will be cash and stock.

Last year, Mitel tried to buy ShoreTel, but its bid was rejected.

Mitel believes Mavenir will help it tap the “voice over long-term evolution” market, which converts voice calls to data over high-speed mobile networks.

“Mitel is a leader in enterprise and cloud communications, markets in which mobility is becoming increasingly influential,” said Rich McBee, President and CEO of Mitel. “With wireless adoption of IP and 4G LTE and demand for next gen mobile services ramping quickly, we see a compelling opportunity to capitalize on a major market transition to add a high-growth mobile business to Mitel.”

4G LTE is a rapidly growing market as more carriers upgrade their networks and more phones support the technology.

“We believe the combination of Mitel and Mavenir creates a powerful new value proposition for enterprises and mobile service providers, using a common IP technology layer as the foundation for convergence, growth and competitive differentiation,” McBee said.

“The move to all-IP LTE mobile networks has created a unique opportunity for service providers to leverage a converged all-IP network to offer feature-rich business and consumer communication services to any device, anywhere, on any access network,” said Pardeep Kohli, CEO of Mavenir.

“We believe that the combined company is ideally positioned to capitalize on the trends within the communications industry today; namely, the convergence across enterprise and mobile networks to all-IP technologies, and the transition to cloud-based unified communications telephony and software-defined virtualized infrastructure,” Kohli added.