AT&T buys its first Israeli company
Posted on October 2, 2007 • By Miriam Schwab
Category: Business, Featured |
AT&T is buying its first Israeli company: Interwise, a web conferencing solutions company. The price: $121m. While this may seem like a windfall for Interwise, it’s not really a great deal for the company’s investors, who’ve poured nearly $100m into the company in 5 financing rounds over 13 years. According to Haaretz.com, some shareholders won’t even cover their original investment. You win some, you lose some.
Once the deal is completed, Interwise will operate as a business unit within AT&T Global Business Services, and the R&D center will continue to operate here in Israel at Airport City.
Interwise started out as a supplier of software services, later specializing in e-learning. They almost folded in 2003 after the dot-com bubble, but managed to come out of the crisis with a new business model, leading to increased revenues and eventually breaking even in 2005. Interwise provides a single platform for virtual web meetings, long-distance learning, seminars and broadcasting over the web.
According to Red Herring, this purchase by AT&T is the latest of three such purchases by large firms, demonstrating the growing interest in IP-based conferencing:
Not long ago voice, video, and web conferencing were distinctly separate technologies that required fairly extensive user expertise to operate.
But firms such as WebEx and Interwise have managed to simplify, stabilize, and integrate multimedia conferencing on IP networks to the point where the market has grown considerably over the last few years.
“Conferencing is no longer something just for executives,” said Frank Zvi, CEO of Interwise. “Voice, video, and web conferencing is now given to everybody within the company just like email.”
Research firm Frost & Sullivan estimates that the overall multimedia IP conferencing market in 2007 will generate $5.9 billion worldwide.
Interwise investors include: Lazard Technology Partners, GE Capital, UBS Capital, NTT, Accenture Technology Ventures, GIMV, Leeds Equity Partners, STI Ventures, Challenge-Etgar Fund, J.P. Morgan, SAP, Texas Pacific Group, Shrem-Fudim-Kelner, Link Technologies Venture Capital, and Jim Manzi, former president of Lotus (from Haaretz.com).
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