Alcatel-Lucent Sells Genesys to Permira, But Keeps Enterprise

Telecommunications equipment giant Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE:ALU, news, filings) says it has a received a binding offer for its Genesys business.  A company owned by the Permira funds will be paying $1.5B in cash for the privilege of owning the customer service solutions business. The deal will see $500M or so in annual revenue and 1,800 employees transition off Alcatel-Lucent’s books, once it gets past regulators of course.

Meanwhile, Alcatel-Lucent has decided to keep its Enterprise business. They had been shopping it around for quite some time now, but apparently weren’t able to get the price they had hoped for. Instead, according to CEO Ben Verwaayen, they will “leverage the natural connections that exist between enterprise and carrier customers, and proactively apply Enterprise’s strengths and momentum in unified communications and data networking with them.” I quoted that because I haven’t the faintest idea what it actually means.

Genesys and the Enterprise unit will maintain a strong commercial relationship via a joint development agreement.

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Categories: Mergers and Acquisitions · Telecom Equipment