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Lync Connectivity Company Acquired by Oracle for $2 Billion

Acme Packet, one of Microsoft's key Lync ecosystem partners, is being acquired by Oracle for $2.1 billion.

The acquisition, announced on Monday, will be Oracle's largest since it bought Sun Microsystems in 2010. The move is an effort by Oracle to add networking to its broadening portfolio of datacenter and applications offerings. It puts Oracle in direct competition with Cisco, which was rumored for some time to have had its sights on Acme.

Enterprises and service providers alike use Acme's appliances to boost the reliability, interoperability and security of IP communications links. The company's Session Border Controllers (SBCs) are used to enhance connectivity of Microsoft's Lync Sever unified communications (UC) platform. Because IP is inherently not reliable or secure, Acme targets session delivery networks to enhance session-based voice, video, data and UC. Acme's session delivery networks offer session boarder control and management to ensure prioritized, secure and trusted delivery of such services and apps.

The company provides enterprise SBCs, which Microsoft recommends to boost the reliability and interoperability of Lync when connected to telecom providers SIP trunks. According to an Acme description of its Lync integration support:

"The session management function routes sessions between your Lync and legacy IP telephony environments, centralizes dial plan management for the entire infrastructure and provides interoperability with non-Lync communications systems. The Net-Net ESD is fully qualified by Microsoft under its Unified Communications Open Interoperability Program and offered in software and appliance configurations that provide efficient, highly scalable solutions for integrating Lync into your network."

A February 2011 TechNet article describes the various network topologies it recommends.

Acme is considered the leader in providing SBCs, though its revenues have declined amid growing competition. It claims that over 1,850 customers in 109 counties have deployed 20,000 systems. The company counts 89 of the top service providers and 48 of the Fortune 100 as customers.

About the Author

Jeffrey Schwartz is editor of Redmond magazine and also covers cloud computing for Virtualization Review's Cloud Report. In addition, he writes the Channeling the Cloud column for Redmond Channel Partner. Follow him on Twitter @JeffreySchwartz.

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