The president of U4EA (News - Alert) Technologies, Columb Harrington, says his company worked with NextHop Technologies for about a year before deciding to acquire the business.

 

The acquisition of NextHop (News - Alert), a premier supplier of Wireless 802.11, will bring the element of wireless to U4EA, which is a leading provider of integrated access technology for converged communications. NextHop will now operate as U4EA Wireless.

 

“We saw it as very opportune,” Harrington said Wednesday, from his Freemont, California, office.

 

Harrington said this gives U4EA a whole product for the Small- to Medium-Sized Business (SMB) market, so the SMBs will not have to buy Multi-service Business Gateways (MSBG) and mobile solutions from different companies.

 

“They won’t have to buy separate pieces and then integrate,” Harrington said. “I think that’s quite unusual in the market today. Certainly, for a small company that is unique.”

 

Harrington said his company was working with NextHop on fixed mobile solutions for about a year, before having the opportunity to purchase the company and put its code into their solutions.

 

“We had the opportunity to acquire them and we took that opportunity,” he said.

 

Harrington said they felt NextHop’s products tied into U4EA’s products and the acquisition gave them an additional product to sell. Also, he said their customers are in a similar market.

 

The NextHop product portfolio includes Wi-Fi 802.11, a-n, controller and access point software. Together, they address SMB, enterprise and service provider requirements for seamless mobility for voice, data and video applications. A broad spectrum of OEM suppliers already use NextHop’s 802.11 Wi-Fi networking and access point control software for their wireless product offerings.

 

Integrating the software with U4EA’s multi-service Business Gateway (News - Alert) Fusion series will address the rapidly growing SMB requirements for seamless mobility, unified communications and highly-integrated and cost-effective solutions. U4EA’s patented QoS (GoSTM) is the key ingredient that ensures voice, data and video can share the same network access link with guaranteed quality and maximum utilization.

 

“Wireless is a great opportunity,” said Jim Greenway (News - Alert), vice president of marketing at U4EA. “We really see that moving quickly into the SMB space.”

 

The company can do product ties and do further integration into their fusion series, Greenway said. With Unified Communications (News - Alert) (UC) becoming such a big focus, he said it’s perfect to add wireless to that solution.

 

Harrington added that they will be picking up “very good engineers” from NextHop and this will be playing into some things that they’ve been working on for a long time. He said NextHop had about 40 employees and now the two companies combined will have about 180 employees.

 

“It was a very opportune time for us to develop a relationship with the people we’ve already been working with,” he said.

 

“We have a lot more control over that whole product that is delivered to the marketplace,” Greenway added.