It has made several efforts to crack the European market, first pinning its hopes on the advent of WCDMA and then bringing its BREW application development environment to the handset makers. But despite meeting with little success, especially with BREW, Qualcomm has pushed ahead with two acquisitions intended to beef up its offering to mobile operators, from back end network infrastructure and content distribution right out to the handsets themselves.
First off, Qualcomm has paid $600 million for Flarion in cash and stock, and is in for a further $205 million in cash and stock depending on certain conditions being met. Completion of the acquisition, which is subject to regulatory approval and other customary closing conditions, is expected later this year. It was in this space last month that we reported that Flarion had beaten Qualcomm to the prize for a national licence in the 450 MHz band in Finland. Now it appears both companies knew at the time that a purchase was likely.
Still, try as they might to appear friends now, Flarion’s director of marketing Jo Barratt recently spent some time with Mobile Europe briefing against the technology qualities of Qualcomm’s CDMA 450 solution.
Now Barratt says that the acquisition is in fact good news for Flarion, and for future purchasers of its FLASH-OFDM because of the increased heft and investment Qualcomm can add to the business.
“It will accelerate Flarion’s technology and gives us a company that can create and ecosystem,” Barratt said. The Flarion man also claimed that the acquisition would increase operators’ choice of which technologies to go for,
“We believe that’s what they bought us for,” he said, “to give operators that want to choose OFDM the confidence to do it.”
Whether OFDM will be viewed as equal within Qualcomm remains to be seen, however. Certainly ceo Paul Jacobs’ initial comments on the acquisition might give room for a different interpretation,
” We believe CDMA will provide the most advanced, spectrally efficient wide area wireless networks for the foreseeable future, but with Flarion we can now more effectively support operators who prefer an OFDM or hybrid OFDM/CDMA track for differentiating their services,” Jacobs said.
The Flarion announcement, which theoretically gives Qualcomm customers a choice of technologies for broadband wireless networks, was followed by the purchase for $57 million in cash for British content management and distribution specialist Elata.
Qualcomm’s stated plan is to combine Elata’s wireless content delivery system, the senses product, with its BREW solution, so that “operators have access to an extensive and modular offering of wireless data solutions and service|”.
Peggy Johnson, president of internet services at Qualcomm, said that the purchase had three main benefits. These were, “supporting the overall delivery of content while maintaining backwards compatibility with operators’ current devices through open standards; strengthening our commitment to meeting the needs of operators worldwide; and quickly bringing new value-added services to market without additional hardware requirements.”
In other words, one service platform can now be used for all content, whether existing Java or OMA compliant content or, Qualcomm hopes, for BREW applications on phones running its chipsets.
Johnson confirmed to Mobile Europe that as yet Qualcomm has no announced European customers for BREW, so the Elata buy is clearly about creating more of an end to end approach to give operators more confidence to support BREW applications.
“For obvious reasons BREW is most common in CDMA environments,” Johnson said, “and European operators had existing download systems. We looked at what we could do to help them set themselves apart and with our purchase of Trigenix we opened up the client side and now with Elata are opening up the content and server side of the product to more operators. Overall it may help BREW but they [the operators] certainly do not have to have BREW to developments for the Elata capabilities to work.
“We certainly have a success in our royalty areas but the Internet Services has its own profit and loss, so we need to stand on our own two feet. We saw that as a product line we were very strong on the device side but needed to boost our server capabilities side as we are looking for new business in the European arena and we can now touch non-BREW devices.”
Stephen Dunford, ceo of Elata, said that “as far as Elata was concerned the feedback from customers had been good”.
“Qualcomm will guve us more fire power, and I’m quite excited by Qualcomm’s activities, building a range of products in the service delivery arena.