Ericsson has sold its enterprise PBX business to Aastra for $102.7 million. Ericsson wants to focus on carriers and service providers. Although the company has said that they will continue to sell enterprise solutions, but only through their carriers and service-provider partners. The deal includes a transfer of some 600 of Ericsson’s employees.

Even though it may seem a little strange at first for a giant like Ericsson to step out of this market when it’s booming, it seems that the company has been focusing on their operator customers for a long time. The company already ditched their mobile phone business unit in 2001, merging it with Sony to create Sony Ericsson.

It may very well be that Ericsson’s no longer interested to try and be a leader in heavily competitive industries such as mobile handsets and enterprise PBX’s, instead focusing its strengths on the somewhat less competitive, but high-margin backend such as delivering operator infrastructure. Only time will tell if Ericsson will become a dinosaur of the industry or the leader in back-end infrastructure.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 2nd, 2008 at 23:50 CET and is filed under Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.