Openwave for sale, Sandvine's buyback, Comverse's Spin-off

Openwave Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: OPWV): 
Openwave announced today that their board of directors has decided to "pursue strategic alternatives"  for the company's mediation and messaging products business.
While this is hardly a surprise, if you have followed the saga over the last year (here, here, here, here and here) it is till sad to see one of the great companies who shaped the mobile internet divest their assets. The company is not completely up for sale, only the product business is, while the board and management team are trying to monetize further their patent portfolio through licensing deals, such as the one with Microsoft, that brought $m18 last quarter.
For a full list of potential acquirer of Openwave assets, don't hesitate to contact me through linked in or my email, at the top right of this page.




Sandvine Corporation (TSX:SVC) (AIM:SAND):
On the heels of reporting their Q4 and fiscal 2011 results ( Q411:$20.6 million revenue GAAP net loss of 3.6 million (non-GAAP¹ loss of $2.8 million); fiscal 2011 revenue $89.3 million and GAAP net loss 5.8 million (non-GAAP¹: $2.2 million loss)) and 44 new customers, announced that its Board of Directors has approved the adoption of an open market stock buyback program for the purchase of up to approximately 12 million common shares ("Shares") over a one-year period.


 Comverse Technology(CMVT)
Comverse technology is the holding structure behind Comverse and Verint. It has announced that it will distribute the share of its wholly owned subsidiary Comverse to their shareholders on a prorata basis. The move is an effort to create a more tax efficient structure and unlock some of the value. The investors welcomed the news with disappointment as the were hoping for a full buyout through M&A.

Openwave CEO replaced - Consolidations to come in the traffic management market

Openwave announced today the resignation of its CEO, Ken Denman, quoting personal reasons. Denman is being replaced by Anne Brennan, the company's CFO.

As we have seen in a previous post, Openwave has been struggling for a while to deliver on the expectations it has raised in the market to provide an integrated traffic management solution for video.

After failing to show the results on over 40 announced trials, after failing to upsell their installed base with their next generation of products, after after buying back old patents and suing RIM and Apple, Openwave sees its CEO resign and, the same day,  is nominating Peter Feld as Chairman of the Board, replacing Charles E. Levine.

This market segment, born from the ashes of the wap gateway market, sees companies like Acision, Bytemobile, Comverse,  Ericsson, Flash Networks, Huawei, Mobixell, Nokia Siemens Networks, and others become the intelligent gateway in the network. That gateway's role is to complement and orchestrate DPI, charging, PCRF, video optimization. It is a key network function.

As most data traffic is browsing related, companies that used to sell wap gateway are the best positioned to capitalize on upselling a richer, more sophisticated gateway that can provide means for operators to control, monetize and optimize browsing and video traffic in their network.

Openwave has not been able to negotiate that trend early enough to avoid its market share being eaten up by traditional competitors and new entrants. Additionally, as the traffic has fundamentally changed since tablets and smartphones have entered the market, key capabilities such as TCP, web and video optimization were late to appear in Openwave's roadmap and proved challenging to build rather than buy.

Mobixell started the consolidation with the acquisition of 724 solutions last year.
I bet we will see more consolidations soon.

BBTM part 2: Comverse & Continuous Computing

Comverse


Comverse is proposing a full spectrum holistic solution to video optimization, including PCEF, DPI, Optimization, Charging and some aspects of  PCRF.
What caught my attention is their strong push for Gi based optimization vs. Gn. 
They advocate that  measure of congestion at RAN level is inconsistent and inconclusive.

The big push is certainly as well an attempt to ward off the network vendors (ALU, NSN, Ericsson, Huawei, ZTE), by arguing that there is an inherent conflict of interest when these vendors are both trying to sell carriers capacity and optimization at the same time. (My experience of working with all these companies is that 80% of the time, the right hand does not know what the left hand does and that for conflict of interest to exist, it would require a lot better organization and strategy than what I have observed).



Comverse proposes that for effective cell-based congestion detection, a mechanism such as a radius interim messages,  triggered at cell level, not Rnc, would provide an effective way to relay RAN congestion indications to the core.


I agree with the premises but I am not sure of the conclusion. A lot of the congestion at RAN level is also signalling and you could end up in interesting snowball effects with Radius messages (notably inefficient, that is one of the primary reasons for Diameter's invention) could greatly contribute to the congestion they are trying to stave off. 


Now, Diameter repeaters at RAN level... that could help.

Continuous computing
I was curious to hear from CC after their recent acquisition by Radisys in May. They present themselves as an "arm dealer" in the optimization and traffic offload war between vendors and offer some interesting perspectives.



Offload is a cost effective way to manage surges and traffic increases but presents significant challenges in CALEA (Legal interception from Law Enforcement Agencies) and charging and policy. 
Effectively, when traffic is offloaded at RAN level, you need paths to trombone it back to the core network for charging, PCRF and optimization functions if you want to get most of your investment, while satisfying both legal regulations and customer SLA.

The rest of the presentation focused of course on Continuous Computing's solution that collocates DPI, traffic offload (on Lu interface, between Rnc and SGSN) and interacts "seamlessly" with their  video optimization, tromboning traffic back to the core before going to the internet through Gi.


I don't think that the "just another bump in the wire" theory actually works for video, where every millisecond of latency counts against the user experience.