Comverse Acquires Odigo

[BigBlueBall News]

Jeff Hester
May 20, 2002

Comverse, a supplier of software for multimedia-enhanced telecom services and a unit of Comverse Technology, Inc., has signed an agreement to acquire privately-held Odigo for $20 million in cash. Comverse already held a 12.4% interest in Odigo, and the two companies have been working closely together.

"Comverse and Odigo have had a long standing-partnership and together have developed instant communications products and services that we have recently begun to offer to (telecom) operators around the world," said Zeev Bregman, Comverse CEO. "This acquisition is consistent with our commitment to provide an open IP-based platform built upon technologies that allow us to deliver to operators a wide range of intelligent, multimodal communication services."

Odigo presently has millions of subscribers, many through licensing agreements with Prodigy, British Telecom and other companies.

For quite some time Odigo has been focusing more on extending it’s messaging and presence capabilities to wireless networks. It appears that Comverse may have been the driving force in this strategy.

What impact this aquisition has on the millions of existing Odigo users is unclear.

Discuss in the Odigo Forum

[Jeff]

Whatever happened to poor old Odigo?