Spirent makes $25 million purchase for voice, video over LTE testing

Spirent Communications has agreed to buy the assets of Radvision’s Technology Business Unit, which includes development and testing capabilities for video and voice over LTE, for $25 million.
Radvision TBU is based in Tel Aviv, Israel, and is part of a wholly-owned Avaya subsidiary. Spirent said the purchase price was funded from cash on-hand and that the transaction is expected to close within 30 to 60 days. The test company said it plans to maintain and strengthen the TBU’s products and services and integrate them with its own test offerings.
“VoLTE testing is already a critical element in many of Spirent’s test solutions,” said Eric Hutchinson, Spirent’s CEO, in a statement on the purchase. “Our customers’ transition from circuit-switched voice networks to all-IP networks presents huge opportunities for VoLTE and RCS services on mobile devices. The addition of Radvision’s Technology Business Unit will expand Spirent’s test solution portfolio to meet the needs of our customers, from early in the development cycle right through to deployment, helping to save many man-years in development time and cost.”
Spirent expects the purchase to be immediately beneficial on a financial basis, and noted that for the full year ended in Sept. 2013, TBU had before-tax profit of $2.7 million and gross assets of $4 million.
Radvision TBU’s technology helped enable most current voice and VoLTE deployments, Spirent said, and it  has “unique expertise in signalling, multimedia and IMS.” TBU’s portfolio is used by developers of mobile chipsets and devices, service providers and communications infrastructure developers.
Some of its key solutions include the ProLab test suite for lab-based testing, which Spirent said will enable the company to “significantly strength its own [VoLTE] test offering;” the EVident monitoring service for voice and video; protocol stacks including IMS and SIP, and developer suites for VoIP and 3G/LTE multimedia applications and services; and a video communications client framework that enables service providers, device manufacturers and app developers to launch IMS-compliant VoLTE/RCS services for devices running Android, iOS, Windows or Mac.