Google announced on Tuesday it plans to acquire Global IP Solutions (GIPS). The transaction agreement agreement under which Google Acquisition Holdings Inc., will make a cash offer to acquire all the shares of GIPS for $2.12 in cash per share or an approximate total price of $68.2 million. Google said the offer will not be subject to any financing condition and will be funded from Google's existing cash resources.
This is another step towards Google's plans to transform and accelerate IP communications, like voice and video conferencing over the Web. Think iPad, iPhone and Android to name a few. Rian Liebenberg, Google's Engineering Director commented,
"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 […] 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.”
Global IP Solutions has been a player in this space for some time now. Headquartered here in San Francisco, GIPS provides voice and video processing in IP communications. It serves application developers, service providers and network equipment vendors. The company has a hefty list of big time clients including Nortel, Oracle, Samsung, WebEx, Yahoo!, AOL and several others.
Based on the release, it doesn't sound like Google plans to shut down any operations at GIPS, especially with the major clients it's working with. Emerick Woods, CEO of GIPS commented, "With Google’s global reach, scale and widely recognized leadership, we are confident that our existing customers will continue to be fully supported while we continue to enhance and extend our products and technology at Google.”
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 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. SPIRIT is proud to offer a
video server 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.