Montreal based Mobivox announced this afternoon that it had been acquired by Indian / MountainView California startup SabSe Technologies. The brainchild of Hotmail co-founder Sabeer Bhatia, and serial entrepreneur Yogesh Patel, Sabse first launched the Sabsebolo.com conferencing service in India, then acquired Jaxtr in June of this past year, and has now acquired Mobivox.
Terms of the acquisition weren’t disclosed, but one source close to the deal said “It’s good for both parties, and plenty of development will be done out of Montreal.” That’s welcome, as Bhatia and Patel could have easily shipped the entire operation offshore.
To date, Sabse has launched a conference calling service, a hosted PBX provider, acquired an international VoIP player, and now they have bought a voice user interface player. What’s the end game? In this 2008 interview, Patel says:
We strongly believe Sabsebolo has the potential to be a dominant player in the market. Not only in the audio conferencing but may be the whole voice platform.
Bob Poe began his piece on this acquisition saying “It’s clear that many VoIP companies aren’t meant to be standalone telecom businesses”. In fact, the market is ripe for a roll-up of VoIP players, and SabSe is clearly taking on this role. Expect to see other players stepping up to the plate as well, as the market for interesting VoIP technology companies heats up.
And if anyone is counting, Mobivox’ exit to Sabse is the 16th in the last five years by a client of VoIP maven Andy Abramson…
Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry maker Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.
