IBM Eyes Nortel Acquisition?

Newest acquisition rumor: A Nortel-focused
blog called All About Nortel says IBM is
considering a purchase of Nortel
, guesstimating that you'd be looking at about
a $4 billion deal.

I'm not really sure why this would make a lot
of sense, at least from a UC perspective, for
either side. Though they integrate with IBM
, Nortel has thrown its lot in with Microsoft.
Nortel would have to do an awful lot of backpedaling and explaining to
anyone who invested in their solutions in the belief that it was the best
way to plan a reasonably painless migration toward Office
Communications Server.

And from the IBM side, I don't know why the deal would make sense. IBM
is now overwhelmingly a software and services company, and Nortel still
sells quite a bit of hardware--not just in the enterprise, but all sorts of
carrier gear, from metro Ethernet and optical to CDMA wireless. Within the
enterprise, Nortel still supports a sizeable legacy TDM PBX base and has
been making an aggressive run at Cisco in the switch/router market by
trying to use the issue of energy consumption.

I'd be very surprised if IBM wanted to be in the carrier-equipment business
, or the switch/router business. Would they really buy the whole company
just to get the enterprise communications line?

This one's a head-scratcher.