M & A Rainmaker

As a founder investor in 5i Limited ( www.5i.co.uk ) which is now owned by the rapidly growing and  expanding 365iT Group ( http://www.365itechnology.com/ ), where I am a shareholder, I like to keep abreast of developments in the Unified Communications world.

This No Jitter article

http://www.nojitter.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=222001106&pgno=1

points out that Google may well be the big dark horse of Unified Communications.

It also talks about Skype ( which I use ), Digium’s Asterisk ( I moderate a Voip and Asterisk Club here http://www.ecademy.com/module.php?mod=club&c=3145 ) , Microsoft ( 5i is also a Microsoft UC specialist ) and IBM ( 365iT is an IBM VAR – although mainly in the virtualisation area ) as being the other parties of interest.

Cisco ( in whom 5i specialises ) is for me the main player to watch in this area and always has been since we first installed a Cisco ( it was actually Celsius then ) voip solution at Voyager in the late 90’s. My investment in 5i was predominantly based on the belief that Cisco would dominate this convergence/UC space.

Skype,Digium,Microsoft and IBM are all growing thier influence in this area but I agree that Google is the one to watch now and look forward to part 2 of this article.