Potential VOIP Investments

Here we'll take a brief look at the first few companies on our list of potential VOIP-related investments. This is just a preliminary culling exercise. Some of these companies will make the short list and others will not.

Once we have a completed short list we'll investigate further into the selected companies.

Aastra Technologies
This Canadian company looks promising. They provide IP phones to the small business segment of the market. They just released their quarterlies this week and the trend is looking good. The stock has already appreciated 50% over the past week, so more digging would be required before making an investment in this one. Their symbol is AAH. TO. See their six months trading chart here at Yahoo. Go to Jon Arnold's comments about Aastra potential. This one moves to the short list.

ABP Technology
ABP Technology is a private company based in Dallas. They are distributors only. But it looks like they are leading distributors in the VOIP arena and their growth could be exponential. Key products distributed are snom technology IP phones, AudioCodes gateways and Allworx and Epygi IPBX's. We'll add this one to the shortlist, though we'd generally assume the big investment wins will be with the developer companies, not the distributors.

ADTRAN
ADTRAN is a big company, big enough to already be part of the Nasdaq 400 MidCaps Index. They got their start in 1986 "following AT&T's divestiture of the RBOCs with restrictions that effectively barred their manufacturing of equipment. These events created an opportunity for companies such as ADTRAN to supply network equipment to the seven RBOCs as well as more than 1,300 independent telephone companies in the United States". ADTRAN has sales of about half a billion annually. The company may have good prospects but doesn't fit in with our list of emerging VOIP-related innovators. So we won't include them on the short list though there's the potential they could buy up one of these short-listed companies soon.

Aculab
Aculab is a private company based in the U.K. with annual sales now over twenty million British pounds. They have 185 employees in five countries. Aculab was named to the 2004 Pulver 100 list as a company to watch in 2005. This is enough qualification to add it to our short list for further consideration.

Alcatel
Alcatel leads in worldwide IP PBX revenue market share, followed by Avaya and Cisco. See Tom Keating's VoIP blog for more info on their quick rise in the VoIP arena. Alcatel makes our short list.

Allworx
Allworx is a division of InSciTek Microsystems, located in the same building in Fairport, New York. InSciTek started out in 1998 as a hardware and software engineering consulting firm. They began development of the Allworx product line soon thereafter. The main product is a single-unit device that integrates phone, PC network, messaging software and group collaboration capabilities. They've raised over $10 million in venture capital so far. We'll include them on the short list but will change the name to InSciTek Microsystems.

This sums up the first six companies on our potential VoIP investments list. See the next post for an alphabetical continuation.