AVAYA News - Avaya Reportedly Planning an IPO

Avaya (News - Alert) Inc. may be the next tech company to file for an initial public offering. The Wall Street Journal today is reporting that the company could make the move as early as this week. The planned IPO is reportedly an effort to raise $1 billion and could value the company at around $5 billion.

This news comes on the heels of a wave of excitement around tech IPOs. If successful, it could provide one more incentive for other network infrastructure outfits that have been on the fence about going public to move forward on this front. However, the stock market has taken a major hit in recent days, so that won’t help matters.
The company, which had been traded on the New York Stock Exchange in the early nineties after its spinoff from Lucent Technologies, currently is a private equity-owned entity. That happened back in 2007 when Silver Lake Partners SILAK.UL and TPG Inc. bought Avaya for $8.3 billion, according to a Reuter’s piece on the IPO.
The WSJ and Reuter’s pieces went on to say that Goldman Sachs Group Inc, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase & Co, Citigroup Inc, Barclays Capital and Credit Suisse Group are expected to underwrite the IPO.
Avaya is a fixture in the business communications space, offering a wide variety of gear, platforms and professional services aimed at business users and developers that target these customers. The company offers phone solutions, unified communications products, contact center solutions, data networking gear, and it recently has been emphasizing its efforts around tablets.
In an interview last year with TMC (News - Alert), Steve Hardy, director of marketing at Avaya, noted:
“We offer a complete suite of unified communications and collaboration applications. That spans all the way from the tools and applications that an end user would use, such as audio web conferencing applications under our Avaya Aura conferencing product through applications that would reside on mobile phones, on PC desktops or on phones themselves.”
He noted the rapid adoption of SIP; businesses uptake of unified communications; the widespread embrace of mobile communications; and Avaya’s focus on enabling collaboration.
As mentioned above, Avaya’s reported IPO plans come in the wake of a new wave of tech IPO action. The recent initial public offering of LinkedIn – which soared 100 percent just minutes after it hit the market – blew the roof off expectations. Then, on Friday of last week, Groupon Inc. announced plans to go public. There’s also a lot of talk about the potential of Facebook (News - Alert) and Twitter to go public.
Of course, all of these companies fall into the social networking space. But we could very likely see more network infrastructure outfits along the lines of Avaya going public in short order as well. For example,GENBAND (News - Alert) has been talking about the prospect of an IPO for some time, as noted in last August’s cover story in INTERNET TELEPHONY magazine, a TMC publication.