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Lucent acquires Mobilitec

MURRAY HILL, N.J.—Lucent Technologies Inc. announced it agreed to acquire Mobilitec, a privately-held provider of content management software for wireless service providers.

Lucent said Mobilitec’s solutions will strengthen its voice, video, data and multimedia applications platforms, thus enabling more service offerings for mobile and broadband subscribers.

San Mateo, Calif.-based Mobilitec has 70 employees worldwide and counts Vodafone, Orange Israel and M1 as customers.

Sandip Mukerjee, vice president of Lucent’s Applications Solutions business, explained that the acquisition will help Lucent, “provide its customers with solutions that help them introduce new next-generation services and capture new sources of revenue.

“Combining content delivery technology and ‘context aware’ capabilities—such as presence and location—will enable service providers to produce unique offers that can appeal to new market segments and groups of users.”

Though Lucent didn’t disclose how much it agreed to pay for Mobilitec, the company noted that it expects the all-cash transaction to close by the end of this year.

Alcatel Inc.’s acquisition of Lucent also looks set to close by the end of the year, as shareholders voted to approve the deal last week. While official numbers are not yet available, Lucent said about 2.3 billion of its 4.48 billion outstanding shares were counted as “yes” votes in favor of the company’s proposal to merge with Alcatel Inc.

Discussing preliminary results, the company said of the 2.4 billion votes cast, 94 percent were in favor of the merger, though those who didn’t vote at all are counted as “no” votes. However, Lucent said the vote resulted in a 52 percent majority in favor of the merger—a slim margin of victory, but a winning margin nonetheless.

Lucent said further details about the vote will be available soon in an SEC filing.

Alcatel’s shareholders reportedly backed the merger with more than 85 percent of the votes, but the company has not disclosed further details about its voting statistics.

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