As the economy finally shows signs of improving, I can’t think of a telecom vendor that is more successful yet less understood than Aastra. With 46 consecutive profitable quarters and one of the most complete portfolios of IP phones and systems, I maintain my long-held view that Aastra has usurped Nortel as Canada’s premier telecom company, for two reasons.

First would be their approach to growing via acquisition.  Starting back in 2000, this has been Aastra’s primary growth driver, and considering the variety of companies and products brought into the fold, they have done a great job blending everything together. Aastra followers will be familiar with the pickups they’ve made along the way, and I’d rather focus on the net result here.

The first thing that stands out is the collective breadth these acquisitions give Aastra. Historically, they have been strong with SMBs, and aside from conventional systems, the Aastralink Pro 160 serves this market with an Open Source Asterisk solution. Until recently, their partnership with Microsoft to support Response Point held considerable promise, and could have made Aastra a truly major SMB player. Microsoft’s abrupt pullback from RP was not Aastra’s doing, so this is more of a lost opportunity than a financial setback.

Moving ahead, Ericsson’s MX-ONE IP PBX provides a strong offering in the mid-large enterprise market, and the previous Intecom acquisition gave them a large-very large enterprise solution with Clearspan. Being IP-based, Clearspan provides more than just a telephony system, and by partnering with BroadSoft, they have a solid solution that adds value for enterprises, especially for UC and contact center applications. The BroadWorks platform can take them even further in terms of SIP trunking, hosted services, and potentially cloud services.

Of course, most of the market is still TDM, and Intecom also brought them Pointspan. These legacy customers will eventually transition to Clearspan, and for now, Aastra will bring them along with varying forms of hybrid TDM-IP solutions.

These acquisitions have also given Aastra a more global footprint, especially in Europe. I see this being equally important for their long-term success, as they can now fully meet the needs of multinational enterprise customers, as well as the much larger pool of SMBs based in emerging markets such as Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. However, despite its global footprint, Aastra still has to make more of a name for itself in North America, which has been challenging.

Aastra’s reach across these various dimensions is impressive, especially considering that they’ve done it rather holistically. They have absorbed both Tier 1 and lesser known brands along the way, while managing to keep the Aastra brand strong (overseas). This is harder to do than it looks, and you don’t have to look far to see how some competitors have handled their acquisitions. Many of these deals require new debt, and in their efforts to consolidate this market, all too often the result is discontinued product lines, staff cuts, R&D closures, channel conflicts and culture clashes. Aastra has only acquired companies or product lines that complement their mix rather than compete, minimizing the need to make these painful decisions that ultimately undermine the value of the deal.

If there is a constant in Aastra’s approach, it’s their focus on open standards. Aside from Pointspan, they are not saddled with legacy product lines, and by embracing SIP they can readily add video and data to voice, integrate wireless (via DECT), and support best of breed solutions with complementary vendors like BroadSoft.

This brings me to the second theme behind their success – serving the top end of the enterprise market. Intecom, an early Aastra acquisition, has a long history serving large enterprises and institutions such as universities.  How well this translates to winning new business and taking high-end customers away from the likes of Cisco and Avaya remains to be seen, given the resources these companies have to protect their installed base. Aastra may have a strong track record with its existing customers, but in difficult times, large enterprises often take the path of least resistance and stick with the tried-and-true. However, where opportunities do arise, it’s important to note that in addition to Clearspan being SIP-based, and able to support best of breed, Aastra has a proven capability to deploy large scale, carrier grade solutions. This will at minimum give enterprises confidence in the technology and the company, both of which are needed to be competitive against the Tier 1 vendors catering to this end of the market. Standards-based solutions are the future as this gives customers the most flexibility and scalability, and this is a core element of Aastra’s value proposition. In addition, Aastra notes that its ability to provide a turnkey solution including implementation and ongoing support has increased customer loyalty and its value proposition.

Large enterprises have long sales cycles, and are best served by a direct sales force. Some resellers may have the technical resources to support large enterprises, but few will be willing or able to provide the effort needed see these opportunities through such long cycles. Aastra has a dedicated sales force serving this market, and I would not underestimate the importance of these direct relationships not just in winning new business, but keeping existing customers for the long run. Tier 1 vendors have been relying increasingly on resellers to keep costs down (remember those debts from their acquisitions!), and the longer this trend continues, the more new business should flow Aastra’s way. However, direct sales forces can be costly to maintain, and it’s important for Aastra to avoid channel conflict between its partners and direct sales team.

If you just keep the two main takeaways from this article in mind – a sound strategy for growing via acquisition, and a successful approach for serving large-very large enterprises – you’ll be much closer in understanding why I hold Aastra in high regard. I still have concerns that Aastra is not well known and has very little market share in North America. The challenge is to increase market awareness and get more of a foothold in the North American market. We’ll see if Aastra is up to the challenge.