NTT Communications Corporation (NTT Com), the ICT solutions and international communications business within global telco giant NTT, has closed on its acquisition of French unified communications specialist (UCaaS) Arkadin International for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition of Arkadin, who are the third largest specialist globally in internet-based collaborative audio, video, web and unified communications, will not only help NTT Communications reinforce its offer in this growing area, but will also help the group gain more of a foothold in France. According to director general of NTT Communications France, the acquisition will grow the group’s team from 500 to 700 in France and enable them to fully integrate with an organization which has been one of their key strategic partners.
Interestingly NTT Communications already has a range of cloud-based, unified communication services called Arcstar UCaaS and Arcstar Conferencing Solutions. However, they’re looking to the infrastructure of Arkadin’s services, their vast client experience, and solid client list to scale-up their services on a global level as well as launch new functionality.
Although a fairly small operation, Arkadin has had an impressive rise since its founding in 2001. Arkadin now has a portfolio of 37k clients around the world hailing from such markets as the France, the UK, Germany, the US, Australia, China, and Japan. They also can boast of many big names such as Orange Business Services, for which it supplies Orange’s internal audioconference service, Michelin, and Carrefour.
It’s nice to see that despite all the doom and gloom about France’s business climate, global businesses’ appetite for acquiring great, innovative French companies is still evident (here, here, here, here, here, etc).
Incidentally, NTT’s NTT Communications unit has been on a bit of an acquisition roll lately having announced the the purchase of managed network, security, and cloud services leader Virtela last month and also announcing yesterday buying an 80% stake in RagingWire Data Centers for $350 million.