Sangoma Announces Transformative Acquisition of Digium

Well isn’t that special!

Look, I get why Sangoma is doing this - for crying out loud Digium was making a profit of 30m a year and Sangoma is picking them up for 28m - that is a deal! In 2 years you pay back the purchase price and double your money! I DON’T understand why Digium is doing it - it’s one thing to sell out when you are going downhill with no way to stop it but when your profitable? Somebody clearly wanted to buy a boat and play with their grandchildren!!!

The one thing I will point out to Sangoma is that the Q&A and press releases are COMPLETELY IGNORING what is going to happen to the IP phones and commercial phone systems and this is BAD NEWS. Nobody who has been around the tech industry for any length of time is going to believe that you are going to maintain independent IP phones and premise-based phone system products for any long period time - the entire point of an acquisition like this is to halt competition. So as I see it - here’s your options:

  1. Kill both products and release a NEW phone system and NEW set of IP phones that combine all the best features of both systems

  2. Replace Digium’s phone system and IP phones with Sangoma’s phone system and IP phones

  3. Reposition/remarket Digium’s phone system and IP phones as the “large company, enterprise” brand and Sangoma’s as the “small business” brand (or vis-versa) - this is what Cisco did when they bought Linksys for example.

So, which is it? I think Sangoma needs to get on it and make that decision ASAP because you have installers out there who are going to be real reluctant to quote a system that might end up being taken off the market in a year or so.