Tekelec

Tekelec, Inc.

Type	Private
Industry	telecommunication-equipment manufacturing
Founded	Calabasas, California (1971)
Headquarters	Morrisville, North Carolina
Key people	Hubert de Pesquidoux, Chairman Ronald J. de Lange, President and CEO Gregory Rush, Senior Vice President, CFO
Products	Session Management, Diameter Signaling Router, Policy Management, Subscriber Data Management, Performance Intelligence Center, Mobile Messaging
Number of employees	1140 (2012)
Website	www.tekelec.com

Tekelec, Inc. is a Morrisville, North Carolina based telecommunications company providing IP services to help mobile carriers with network signaling, policy control, and subscriber data management.

The company, founded in Calabasas, Califorinia in 1971, was acquired by Oracle in 2013, from Siris Capital Group.^[1]

Corporate history

Jean-Claude Asscher

In 1961, Jean-Claude Asscher founded Tekelec-Airtronic, SA, a French electronics company with emphasis on the aviation industry. Jean-Claude Asscher serves as the president and chairman of the board of directors of Tekelec-Airtronic, SA.

In 1971, Jean-Claude Asscher founded Tekelec, Inc. as a North American company specializing in telecommunications products, such as telecommunications test equipment initially. Tekelec was initially financed by proceeds earned by Jean-Claude Asscher through Tekelec-Airtronic.

For many years, Jean-Claude Asscher was president, CEO, and chairman of the board of directors of both Tekelec-Airtronic and Tekelec. In recent years Jean-Claude Asscher has served as only chairman of Tekelec's board of directors while continuing to be the president of Tekelec-Airtronic's board of directors as well as its chairman.

Philip Black

Asscher found Philip Black, in the early 1980s, who was tasked with re-creating the U.S Tekelec company so that could successfully sell Tekelec Airtronic products in the U.S., or create their own testing products. Philip Black assembled a core crew of people, including Anders Hultin, Bob Hess, Adrian Warren, Peter Rifkin, Annette Michaelson, Michael Leigh, Joseph Noble, Jerome Nathan and Stephan Greppi, among others. This team created, marketed and sold the protocol simulator analyzers, named Chameleon and Chameleon II which fueled the sales of Tekelec for over 10 years. Tekelec successfully competed with two pre-existing competitors, Atlantic Research and Idacom, to become the dominant player in this specific type of test equipment. The company went public in the mid-1980s. Tekelec later transitioned to operating equipment in the form of Signalling System 7 products, under the initial lead of Peter Vicars, who followed Philip Black as CEO.

Peter N Vicars

Peter N Vicars joined Tekelec and served as its President and Chief Executive Officer from July 1987 until January 1994. During this tenure revenues increased from $13M to $58M while maintain six years of double digit profitability within its core business of testing solutions which represented 85% of corporate revenues. Vicars successfully acquired and integrated a leading SS7 company(Protocol Technologies) to strengthen Tekelec's market position in cellular and switching technology. Based on that acquisition Vicars guided the entry into a new market for the corporation with a breakthrough approach, the Eagle platform and revenues grew to $12M over the first year of product shipments. Vicars is also credited for implementing an expense reduction program, due to the switching product startup development and initial market entry costs, which returned the corporation to profitability.

Franco (Frank) Plastina

Franco Plastina joined Tekelec and served as President and Chief Executive Officer and as a director in February, 2006. Plastina stepped down from his position as President and CEO of Tekelec in January 2011 following poor results where sales of the main product line, Eagle, dropped off much more sharply than expected, before replacement products (such as policy) became fully available. Krish Prabhu, a member of the Board of Directors, was appointed Interim President and CEO.

Ronald J. de Lange

Ronald J. de Lange joined Tekelec in July 2005 and most recently served as executive vice president Global Business Solutions before being promoted to CEO in May 2011. He is a 24-year veteran of Lucent Technologies, where he held a number of leadership roles. In his most recent position as vice president of Convergence Solutions, he led merger, acquisition and integration efforts. He directed next-gen strategy, devising cross-functional convergence solutions and has managed a number of functions, including sales, marketing, manufacturing and finance

Products

Diameter Signaling Router

Tekelec's Diameter Signaling Router centralizes routing, traffic management and load-balancing tasks to create an architecture that enables IMS and LTE networks to grow incrementally to support increasing service and traffic demands.

Policy Management

The Tekelec Policy Server product, a fully compliant 3GPP PCRF, manages policy rules between applications and policy enforcement points like access devices. Policies can be re-configured to manage and control Quality of Service (QoS), charging, quota, optimization and admission control.

Subscriber Data Management

Tekelec’s Subscriber Data Management (SDM) product family consolidates and manages cross-domain subscriber data – location, network authentication, access preferences, services, identities and presence – as a single logical profile.

EAGLE STP

Tekelec's STP product supports key functions like signal transfer, signaling gateway, number portability, and integrated monitoring. Tekelec's STP features include: Short Message Service (SMS) Router, Voicemail Router, and Home Location Register (HLR) Router.

Diameter Routing Leadership

In March 2011, Tekelec's Diameter Signaling Router was recognized by the Frost & Sullivan "New Product Innovation Award, Diameter Routing" for its superior ability to help operators overcome Diameter signaling challenges in LTE networks. Frost & Sullivan independently identified Diameter Routing as a new award category due to at least 60 LTE networks anticipated to be in commercial service by the end of 2012, creating "rapid uptake in Diameter signaling." ^[2]

In October 2010, it was announced that MetroPCS selected Tekelec's Diameter Signaling Router for deployment in the first U.S. LTE network.^[3]

Technology Innovations

In June 2012, Tekelec was awarded Most Innovative Company by Pipeline Publishing's Innovation Awards. A panel of service providers and industry analysts selected Tekelec as the company that best embraces and promotes innovation throughout its organization.^[4]

Number Portability Leadership

Industry research and consultancy firm Analysys Mason named Tekelec as the global market leader with 35 percent market share of real-time connection number portability solutions.^[5]

In 2008, Tekelec's number portability solution was deployed in carriers serving 750 million subscribers, out of more than two billion global subscribers who had number porting capability and as of March 2009, Tekelec had 79 number portability customers in 28 countries, and most recently announced delivery of number portability solutions to T-Mobile Germany.

Acquisitions

March 25, 2013: Oracle announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Tekelec, a leading provider of network signaling, policy control, and subscriber data management solutions for communications networks.

January 27, 2012: Tekelec announced the completion of its acquisition by a consortium led by Siris Capital Group, LLC (“Siris”) and including affiliates of The ComVest Group, funds and accounts managed by GSO Capital Partners LP, Sankaty Advisors LLC, ZelnickMedia and other Siris limited partners and affiliates, in a transaction valued at approximately $780 million.

May 6, 2010: Tekelec announced agreements to acquire policy control leader Camiant and evolved subscriber data management (SDM) company Blueslice Networks. The Blueslice acquisition was complete May 5, 2010. The Camiant acquisition was completed May 7, 2010.

December 17, 2008: Tekelec acquired mBalance, a Netherlands-based developer of mobile messaging solutions, for 38 million USD. In May 2011, about 65% of staff were laid off and over the following year most of the remainder departed, being replaced by contractors; the company has since been resold.

February 5, 2008: Tekelec acquired substantially all of the assets of Estacado Systems, LLC, a software development company led by a team that has been instrumental in the creation of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and a number of its advanced features.^[6]

August 3, 2005: Tekelec purchased German and Czech-based iptelorg GmbH, developer of leading-edge Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) routing software, securing a critical IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) capability for Tekelec.

Shareholder class action lawsuit

On January 6, 2011 a securities fraud class action lawsuit was filed on behalf of Tekelec investors. The lawsuit alleges that Tekelec misled the investing public about its business dealings in emerging markets (namely India), thereby inflating the price of TKLC stock.^[7] The lawsuit claims that these misleading statements made by Tekelec amount to a violation of US securities laws, and caused significant financial losses to holders of Tekelec stock.^[8]

The share price in Q4 2010 ran at about 18 dollars. By the start of Q2 2011, the share price ran at about 7.75 dollars.

References

External links

• Information about the Tekelec Class Action Lawsuit