Though the purchase price will shave $0.01 to $0.02 off earnings per share in its current 2005 financial year, and only be neutral to slightly accretive in 2006, Lucent believes the price is worth paying for a company that has sold products to 50 carriers and boasts that it has more than three million ports deployed.
Terms of the deal are that Lucent will exchange 92.7 million of its common stock and options for all of Marlboro, Massachusetts-based Telica’s equity.
After recording three successive quarters of profits, the acquisition suggests growing confidence at Lucent which is recovering from a period of cut-backs after carriers slammed the brake on spending.
Janet Davidson, president of Lucent Technologies’ Integrated Network Solutions business said the addition of Telica would strengthen its Accelerate VoIP product portfolio and enable it to address a much wider range of network build-outs.She said Telica would give it a flexible, open architecture to respond to the different approaches its customers are taking with the evolution of their networks.
Telica, which has about 250 employees worldwide, offers a softswitch-based packet switch for both time division multiplexer and VoIP switching.
