Shiva looks set for buyout

Redundancies Nortel was understood to have an interest in buying ailing vendor Shiva.

Shiva's future was hanging in the balance this week with Nortel beingng vendor Shiva. touted as a buyer for the struggling networking vendor after it was forced to axe 12 of its UK sales staff.

The UK redundancies follow the resignation of Angelo Santinelli, VP of marketing at Shiva US, who left the company over a week ago for 'personal reasons'.

A representative at Shiva said: 'We are focusing on efficiency and the redundancies are due to wastage and natural progress.'

Steve Jenkinson, Shiva sales director, and Chris Watt, account manager at Shiva, were among the redundancies which include pre-sales support and account managers.

Jan Bruggink, recently promoted sales director at Shiva, confirmed that a number of people had gone but refused to comment on plans to sell the company, if it was in talks with Nortel about a possible buyout, or whether more people would lose their jobs.

However, a source said Nortel had expressed interest in buying the company with which it already has an OEM agreement to develop the Rapport CAS product.

The vendor had recently posted figures for its Q4 ended 3 January, showing a loss on revenue from $48.2 million for the same quarter last year to $37.9 million.

Revenue for the year revealed a drop from $200.1 million last year to $144.3 million. The results included a $2.6 million write down on excess inventory for the quarter. Profit for the quarter hit $19.3 million which dropped from $27.5 million for the same period last year.

Mark Purdom, European corporate marketing manager at Ascend, said: 'The remote access market is growing so it is a bad sign if a company is declining.'

He added: 'When you lose it is very hard to recover given the competitive state of the market.'

A source said it understood that Nortel was rumoured to be interested in buying Shiva and added: 'The company is just not selling anything and its share price has just vanished recently.'

Nortel refused to comment on the situation with Shiva.