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Vonage's Ambitious Growth Plans
By Mark Evans | March 28, 2005
Looks like Vonage believes the future is still bright based on plans to move to a new corporate headquarters in Holmdel, N.J. Vonage spokesman Jamie Serino told the Asbury Park Press the new office building will have enough room to allow the company to double its workforce to 2,000 this year. The new office will accomodate Vonage's corporate offices, call center, network operations, research and operations and other functions. I guess having another $100 million in private equity will make it easy for Vonage to move to bigger digs. Of course, it may have to use some of the money to battle a lawsuit in Texas over access to 911, and continue its marketing campaign as the cablecos and carriers get more serious about the Internet telephony business. The big question is whether 2005 will be the year that Vonage gets snapped up? Based on reports about its new financing plans, Vonage is probably $1 billion to $1.5 billion depending on how much of a takeover premium you want to apply.
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March 28th, 2005 at 12:35 pm
That's Asbury - not Ashbury. As in Springsteen's “Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ”
This building is about 5 1/2 miles from AT&T's South Jersey consolidated R&D center in Middletown, where a lot of the CallVantage product work takes place. It's also about 4 miles from the old Holmdel lab. That went to Lucent when AT&T split up. That building, parking lot, and access roads had a distinct look and is easily spottable on satellite maps of the area.
The old Holmdel building probably housed around 5,000 people at one time. The AT&T Middletown (to become SBC Middletown?) building was built up as a state of the art facility with private offices for all, group kitchens, and tons of collaboration space. It had numerous service facilities to compete with the excesses of the dot.com niceties.
Sadly, one of the characteristics of both Holmdel and Middletown these days is the ease of finding a parking space, the hollow sound of the corridors, and the no-waiting Aramark lunch rooms.
Will centrally managed ITSP services suffer the same fate as the dinosaur telcos? I think so - and it will be much quicker.