Lucent Acquires Livingston Enterprises

By Jay Hipps, Hacienda Network Staff Writer

Livingston to Become a New Division of Telecom Hardware Giant

Lucent Technologies will acquire Hacienda's Livingston Enterprises in a merger involving approximately $650 million in Lucent stock. The transaction is expected to be completed by the end of the month.

Livingston, a leading provider of remote access networking solutions for Internet Service Providers (ISPs), will be left intact and brought in as a separate unit, according to Lucent spokesperson Scott Horne.

"They will remain focused and organized as they are, and brought into the fold as a separate unit," he says. Steve Willens, Livingston's president and CEO, will head the new division for Lucent.

Complementary Products

Lucent's communication system products complement the Livingston line, with little duplication. In fact, Livingston uses Lucent's K56flex modem cards in their flagship product, the PortMaster 3 Integrated Access Server.

"The two companies' products fit quite well together," says Horne. "Livingston has a good track record and strong relationships with smaller local and regional ISPs and Lucent has sales and service support that can help take Livingston's products to larger service providers.

"We have our successes in different ends of the market, and putting them together gives us a broader reach across all of the market."

Opportunities for Livingston

"We are tremendously excited about becoming part of Lucent," says Livingston's Willens. "On our own, we built a leadership position providing remote access servers to more than 2,200 ISPs around the world. Just think what we can do with the relationships and resources of Lucent behind us."

Willens sees a variety of opportunities arising from the new relationship. "With our existing remote access server family and with new capabilities under development, working as a part of Lucent we have the opportunity to more effectively meet the needs of the diverse set of ISPs and traditional service providers offering Internet service," he says. "This deal with Lucent is a natural fit, our advanced technology and products and Lucent's unmatched experience as a high-quality supplier to large service providers."

Founded in 1986

Livingston Enterprises was founded in 1986 as a developer of information management systems for the multinational technology and communications communities. In 1990, the company entered the networking business with the launch of the PortMaster Communications Server.

The company's offering was perfectly timed to take advantage of the explosion of data networking opportunities that were created with the increase in popularity of the Internet and the invention of the World Wide Web. Some of the first customers that adapted Livingston's technology were ISPs, a relationship that Livingston has used to its benefit. In fact, a 1996 study by industry analysts Infonetics research showed Livingston with a 67 percent market share among ISPs.

A New Direction

"While the data networking industry is growing rapidly, the remote access business is particularly attractive, with overall growth at more than 20 percent," says Bill O'Shea, president of Lucent's Business Communications Group. "By purchasing Livingston, we have the opportunity to add significant new data networking revenue."

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