A senior vice president of Ericsson earlier this month revealed that at some point his company would consider buying networks from operators.
This is not much of a surprise coming from an equipment provider who now runs over 300 mobile networks and manages a potential 700 million subscribers across multiple continents.
Clearly the global recession blew a hole in the telecom infrastructure sector. Some of the billion dollar giants disappeared from the face of the planet.
Nortel was broken away into pieces to be acquired by Ericsson, Genband and others, Motorola Networks Division is being melded into NSN, and a merged Alcatel-Lucent could possibly raise private equity and go into private holding.
It could be right to say that Alcatel-Lucent may have escaped the blitzkrieg thanks to their merger and thus the combined clout, but Ericsson somehow managed to hang in there – alone, without a partner.
It is probably the only large equipment vendor to stay unscathed by this wave of consolidation.
One major transition that all of these companies went through was a transformation from pure infrastructure vendors to managed services players. The significant revenue contributions from their services businesses have changed the sector's revenue mix for good.