TMCnet Feature

It’s no secret that the bring-your-own-device trend is creating significant new challenges for enterprises. As a result, everybody and their brother seem to be hawking solutions to help business customers manage the untamed wireless beast. To better appeal to mid-to-large enterprises looking for holistic solutions in this new BYOD world, Symphony Services today announced it is buying Teleca. The value of the deal, which involves two privately owned businesses, was not disclosed.

The combined company will do business under the banner Symphony Teleca Corp. and expects to bring in $350 million in revenue this year, meaning the deal doubles the size of the former Symphony. The leader of the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company is CEO Sanjay Dhawan.

“The two companies are merging to really accelerate enterprise mobility,” Keith Higgins (News - Alert), chief marketing officer, told TMCnet earlier this week.

Symphony traditionally has worked closely with enterprise software companies, whereas Teleca’s software and services have catered to the needs of wireless device suppliers like Nokia (News - Alert). Now, with the Teleca deal under its belt, Symphony will have a broader and deeper product portfolio, staff expertise, and geographic coverage on the wireless front, Higgins said. The company expects to announce a post-merger solution portfolio within the next 90 days, he told TMCnet. As for staff, the deal increases Symphony’s headcount from 4,000 to 6,100 people. And Teleca, which is based out of Sweden, has a very strong European presence, according to Higgins.

Symphony Teleca Corp. will consist of three divisions: one focusing on core software, which has been Symphony’s strength; a business that offers software and services to device manufactures, which is Teleca’s specialty; and an enterprise mobility unit.

While enterprise mobility has become a hot area for many IT outfits, Higgins pointed out that Gartner (News - Alert), in one of its Magic Quadrant reports, showed 10 to 12 companies in the mobile enterprise application analysis space, but noted there is no one leader in the category. He went on to say that there are a lot of different technologies in use on the mobile application front. Symphony Teleca, Higgins said, can help organizations decide which platform(s) to use, how to interface that with their app stores, and even how to create and support an enterprise app store (which Symphony can deliver as a managed service).

But that’s just a piece of the enterprise mobility puzzle. Symphony also can assemble for businesses mobility solutions including best-in-class software from multiple vendors, mobility expense management, device acquisition and more.

“We are the first company at scale who enterprises can come to for an end-to-end mobile enterprise solution,” said Higgins.

And, he added, Symphony can do that without requiring businesses to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on outsourcing, as do some of the larger systems integrators.