Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Broadcom is appearing on the M&A lists again, thanks to its $5.9bn acquisition of Brocade, a manufacturer of networking equipment and storage infrastructure. The move is a definite expansion for Broadcom, but the new company will be shedding WiFi service provider Ruckus Wireless, which Brocade acquired earlier this year for $1.2bn. As well as Ruckus, Broadcom (itself recently acquired for $37bn by Avago, which then took the US company’s name) will also look to offload data center switching, routing, and software offerings – essentially its whole IP networking business. This leaves Broadcom with the core fiber Storage Area Networks (SAN) components, which does not look as lucrative as that IP networking division but is core to Broadcom. Broadcom has four…
BlackBerry has signed a deal to work directly with Ford, to directly supply its QNX operating system to the automaker as a Tier One partner. Ford currently uses QNX in its SYNC 3 IVI tech (in-vehicle infotainment), in modules that it buys from Panasonic Automotive. BlackBerry hopes that the new relationship will open doors for QNX inside Ford, to move into other areas of Ford’s connected car ambitions. Claiming deployments in some 60m vehicles on the road (up around 10m in the past year), and the number one spot in both IVI systems and telematics, BlackBerry’s QNX has been a very quiet success for the company – which has never exactly publicly sung the praises of QNX despite weathering a…
M&A, Strategies, Alliances Fleet Complete has acquired Securatrak, a provider GPS-based vehicle tracking based in Australia, adding it to Fleet Complete’s portfolio of fleet and workforce management. Leedarson has joined the ZigBee Alliance board, adding another industrial lighting company to the low-power mesh networking standards group. Accenture has acquired Realworld OO Systems, a specialist in geographic information systems (GIS) aimed at utilities looking to implement smart grid efficiency improvements. Infiswift has acquired Smart Resource Labs, to expand its IoT platform’s analytics capabilities with greater asset management tools. Nexeon Medsystems has acquired Rosellini Scientific Benelux, a specialist in deep brain stimulation and wireless neurostimulators for mHealth applications. The Thread Group has announced its expansion into commercial buildings, as a new alliance…
Canonical has unveiled the latest version of Ubuntu Core, its rather cool OS aimed at IoT devices and data center equipment. Claiming great successes in networking infrastructure deployments, Canonical now has to manage the transition into IoT devices out in the field – and hopes that its developer-friendly approach will win out. Industrial gateways and IP networking infrastructure developers are easier sells than some of the emerging IoT applications that Canonical would like to see Ubuntu deployed in. A potentially lucrative market that the company has already taken early steps in is telco-led consumer premises equipment (CPE), following its inclusion in a private cloud box from Nextcloud and Western Digital – which could form the basis of a cloud-DVR for…
A seven-year long case between YouTube and German licensing body GEMA (Gesellschaft für musikalische Aufführungs) has been resolved, with the two parties agreeing to allow more than 70,000 artists, authors and publishers to appear on the video sharing platform. GEMA was unhappy with the low royalty fees being paid as well as safe harbor issues – with the European Union (EU) banning the transfer of its citizens’ data outside EU borders. Arris has opened the doors of its new R&D and Operations facility in Bangalore, India. The US set top firm said the center is an IP creation hub so that engineers from former Arris and Pace sites in the region can join forces to further development of technologies such…
UK semiconductor firm ARM, freshly acquired by Japan’s giant telco Softbank, has unveiled two new products this week – a multi-codec video processor focused on HEVC, and a GPU (graphics processing unit) to drive mobile augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) use cases. ARM is clearly confident that the popularity and prevalence of VR and AR applications in the mobile market will continue to soar, as the newly launched Mali-G51 chip aims to take hold of the mainstream smartphone space, building on the achievements of the Mali-G71 GPU in premium mobile devices. The Mali-G51 GPU is essentially a downgrade from the Mali-G71 GPU which it showed off at the Computex trade show in Taiwan earlier this year – but…
There is now barely a week that goes by without a multi-$ billion merger between chip vendors, and as the ink dries on the Qualcomm NXP deal from last week, Broadcom said it will hoover up $2.5 billion San and IP chip player Brocade for $5.9 billion. It plans to sell off the IP network side of the business, which should lead to an annual revenue lift of around $1.8 billion for Broadcom. Brocade operates in 3 segments the largest of which is San (Storage Area Networking), as well as IP Networking and Global Services. It also acquired WiFi specialist Ruckus in May this year for $1.3 billion, in cash and shares, which would have bumped its revenue above $2.5…
The appointment of Bob Bakish this week as the CEO of Viacom could be the most shortlived appointment for a content CEO in modern times, as long as you don’t count the previous appointment of the interim CEO, Tom Dooley, who took the role just 6 weeks ago and almost immediately agreed to stand down. We are not even assuming that Bakish will fall out with the Redstone family despite its abrasive style of management. It’s just that it’s pretty clear that they are after merging Viacom with CBS, and unless they cannot reach agreement with CBS CEO Leslie Moonves, that could happen quite soon, and he would only agree if he was left in charge of both companies. Dooley…
The Justice Department’s case announced this week against DirecTV seems misguided. The case claims that DirecTV Chief Content Officer, Daniel York shared pricing information when negotiating with Time Warner Cable for its Dodgers based sports channel, SportsNet LA. In other words, it was okay for Time Warner Cable to blackmail MVPDs with subscriber losses if they failed to sign up the highly priced sports network, but it was not okay to tell anyone about it. The case alleges that by sharing details with the only other potential sources of TV in the LA Area – Charter, Cox and AT&T – that the high priced blackmail – “You’ll lose subscribers because everyone else is taking it, yes at that price” was…
General Electric’s Digital arm is being groomed by its parent to usurp the throne from physical machinery in terms of future profits. Home of strategic platforms like Predix and the Industrial Internet Initiative (III), the software and cloud services division is taking a position of rising power and influence across the industrial end of the Internet of Things (IoT). Its latest supporter is NEC of Japan, which will be deploying Predix, the cloud-based operating system and services platform for the IoT, in order to optimize its supply chain and factory operations. Applications using Predix APIs and running on its cloud platform can connect industrial assets, analyze their data and deliver real time insights for optimizing GE and non-GE equipment. Developed…
T-Mobile USA’s eccentric CEO John Legere will be on cloud nine after reporting results for the third quarter that far outshone its two big rivals AT&T and Verizon. It added almost 2m net mobile connections in Q3 to give it a total of 69.4m – claiming it did so by ransacking 400,000 subscribers from AT&T in the quarter, as well as 300,000 from Sprint and 250,000 from Verizon. The big winner here is mobile-first TV and the key ingredients are simply unlimited data and content, which is exactly what T-Mobile US brings to the table with its controversial Binge On service. It has signed up a wealth of content providers, including Netflix, Amazon, YouTube and HBO – allowing users to…
If ever a company needed to make a left-field choice of CEO, it was Ericsson. It should have emulated IBM – whose position on the precipice in the early 1990s the Swedish firm now occupies – and hired someone from a wholly different industry to bring fresh thinking. Instead, it has appointed Börje Ekholm, a board member of a decade’s standing, an expert in finance rather than business strategy – and the most controversial thing analysts could find to say about him was that he lives in the US rather than Sweden. This comes at a time when the established mobile equipment players are in dire need of a far more radical response to the huge changes in their industry.…
AT&T insists its proposed acquisition of Time Warner would, if approved, accelerate its deployment of 5G because it would want to race ahead with the multiscreen, video-over-anything concept which lies at the heart of the deal. As AT&T looks to build its exclusive video content store, it will want the fastest connections to deliver that, whether wired or wireless. “We would probably have a desire to move faster on 5G, certainly not slower,” said CEO Randall Stephenson on an analyst call, amid speculation that the cost of the purchase might clip AT&T’s wings in terms of 5G investments. There has already been talk that the telco has pulled out of the 600 MHz auction in order to save its funds…
Qualcomm has agreed a deal to acquire Dutch chipmaker NXP Semiconductors for $47 billion – $17 billion more than the original proposed offer. This purchase pushes Qualcomm into third place in the global semiconductor market, leapfrogging SK Hynix and trailing Intel and Samsung. NXP offers diversified business opportunities in industries such as the IoT and automotive sectors, away from Qualcomm’s core mobile SoCs, GPUs and radio businesses. Nordic operator Telia has selected IPTV set tops from Arris to support the launch of its new streaming service in Sweden and Finland which launched last week – integrating Netflix and YouTube content. Arris’ VIP4302 set tops deliver HEVC, and have also found favor at Intigral recently, a UAE-based provider of video solutions…
CDN load balancing specialist Cedexis announced a partnership this week with Sweden’s Varnish Software, a pioneer in open sourced caching software. The idea is that Cedexis will be able to create a hybrid, using an instance of Varnish to fill in the performance holes in a CDN network. Essentially Varnish is an open source web accelerator or cache, with a few secret sauce extras in its paid-for product line, which improve performance further. A cache simply keeps regularly requested pages already made up as images, so there is no processing time taken in creating them. Varnish says that this approach can improve performance by up to 99%, and it has just begun to understand the effect this can have on…
T-Mobile USA’s eccentric CEO John Legere will be on cloud nine after reporting results for the third quarter that far outshine its two big rivals AT&T and Verizon. It added almost two million net mobile connections in Q3 to give it a total of 69.4 million – claiming it did so by ransacking 400,000 subscribers from AT&T in the quarter, as well as 300,000 from Sprint and 250,000 from Verizon. The big winner here is mobile-first TV and the key ingredients are simply unlimited data and content, which is exactly what T-Mobile US brings to the table with its controversial Binge On service. It has signed up a wealth of content providers, including Netflix, Amazon, YouTube and HBO – allowing…
Last week’s Broadband World Forum in London focused heavily on network virtualization, but there was little consensus. As always in the early days of a significant architectural shift, operators are deeply divided between the trailblazers and the cautious movers, and between the technology bulls and bears. There was a common theme that anything vendor-controlled or proprietary would be killed by a rising reliance on open source processes. Despite some qualms about this unfamiliar world, most operators – publicly at least – hail this as a positive, a way to tap into more innovation while ending supplier lock-in by adopting open interfaces and multivendor platforms. They also hoped open source would enable quicker transformation, but in this regard, the number of…
All over the world, network operators are racing to escape the bit-pipe trap. The value attached to the access provided by their fixed and mobile networks has been steadily eroded, in the eyes of consumers, service providers and shareholders. The growth in their networks’ capacity, cost and complexity is in inverse proportion to how highly these assets are valued, and what profits can be driven by them. Hence the rise of the new-look operator, as epitomized in AT&T’s recent acquisition history. The new operator spreads its reach wider, to embrace the multiplay – wired and wireless connectivity to support broadband, telephony, TV, mobile applications, and increasingly, smart homes and cars. And it extends its reach upwards, from the access layer…
Amazon has taken direct aim at Spotify and Apple Music with the launch of its new and improved Amazon Music Unlimited streaming service. Amazon’s Music Unlimited service offers a huge catalog of over 30 million songs that are available anytime and anywhere across a myriad of devices and platforms including iOS, Android, Sonos, desktop computers and Amazon’s Fire tablets and Echo devices. And similar to Spotify and Apple Music – the two services that dominate the streaming music space at present – Amazon’s Music Unlimited offers features such as playlists created by algorithms or based on a users’ prior music choices, handpicked playlists curated by Amazon Music experts, and a recommendation engine designed to help users discover new music. And…