Google Makes Bid For VoIP Co. Supporting Yahoo, AOL, Baidu
Google said Tuesday it has made a $68 million offer to acquire Global IP Solutions Holding, an Internet voice and video company. The deal could put the Mountain View, Calif. company in direct competition with Skype, as well as supporting search rivals. GIP customers include Yahoo, IBM, AOL, Nortel Networks, and Baidu.
The offer comes one day before the Google I/O conference. The company fits nicely between Google's existing voice services, Google Voice, and the acquisition of Gizmo 5. It could give Google the technology it needs to move forward and provide wider support for VoIP from landline phones and mobile devices.
"The Web is evolving quickly as a development platform, and real-time video and audio communication over the Internet are becoming important new tools for users," Google Engineering Director Rian Liebenberg said in a prepared statement. "GIPS's technology provides high quality, real-time audio and video over an IP network, and we're looking forward to working with the GIPS team at Google to continue innovating for the Web platform."
Trip Chowdhry, managing director at Global Equities Research, in a research note points to GIP's technology integrating well with unannounced phones from Samsung, Motorola and HTC that have two cameras. He also mentions that both Apple and Google, separately, continue to "stress test CLWR WiMAX Network for both capacity and latency."
The cash buyout offer should expire around June 4. The Norwegian company shares trade on the Oslo Stock Exchange. Global IP's board recommends the offer. The companies say the offer price represents a 27.5% premium to Global IP's closing price on Friday.
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All the industry is talking about Google aim to control all major VoIP technologies. Its intention to buy GIPS seems quite reasonable then. The other aspect is what it means for the current GIPS customers. Let’s not forget that some of them are direct competitors of Google. It’s not unlikely they will have to be satisfied with limited maintenance or no support at all. Google will for sure use VoIP as a platform in its Android OS, Google Chrome and very likely in its Google Apps. Google will require all GIPS’ expertise and engineering resource to support its VoIP strategies.
On the other hand there is SPIRIT DSP which has been successfully competing with GIPS over all these years and now stays the only independent VoIP technology company on the market. SPIRIT is famous for its dislodging GIPS from Skype and was listed among the Top 10 VoIP leaders (http://www.fiercevoip.com/special-reports/top-10-voip-leaders) by FierceVoIP. Today SPIRIT offers its VVoIP platform on a variety of desktop and mobile platforms, supporting not only Google’s Android but iPhone, Symbian, Windows Mobile (http://www.spiritdsp.com/press/videoconferencing-on-mobile-platforms.php). SPIRIT is proud to offer a video server (http://spiritdsp.com/press/Video-server-1000-channels-release.php) with 1000-channel capacity. Now SPIRIT is the #1 choice for service providers, application developers, and telcos that are deploying voice and video communication services.