Mobixell Raised $10M - Expects Sales of $40M in 2011

TheMarker reports today (here, Hebrew) that Mobixell (see recent posts - here, here and here) completed a $10M funding round from existing investors.

Amir Aharoni, Mobixell's CEO (picture) told Themarker's reporter Guy Grimland: "We grew from a small startup to a medium-size company with sales of $30M a year, following the acquisition of 724 solutions [here] .. we sell mainly in central Europe and some in India, China, Indonesia, Russia and East Europe .. our goal is to reach revenues of $40M in 2011 and $50-60M in 2012".

Coopetition - Openwave Licensed Patents to Mobixell/724

  

Openwave announced that "it has licensed certain patents to Mobixell/724 Solutions Inc. On July 31, 2009, Openwave Systems Inc. filed a patent infringement lawsuit against 724 Solutions .. alleged that 724 Solutions had infringed several of Openwave’s networking and communications patents . The details of the agreement between the parties remain confidential."

See "Openwave Licenses Wireless Patents to Mobixell/724 Solutions" - here.

Ken Denman, CEO, Openwave said: “Going forward, Openwave will continue to invest in developing our industry leading technology, will look to collaborate with others to bring innovations to market, and will continue to protect our intellectual property.”

DPI Deployments (10): Belgacom Uses Mobixell (724) to Manage Mobile Broadband Services

  

Mobixell announced that Belgacom, Belgium's largest mobile operator deployed Mobixell's Seamless Access Solution, a product of 724 Solutions, recently acquired by Mobixell.

Press release - "Mobixell Announces Deployment of Seamless Access at Belgacom to Manage the Growth of Their Mobile Internet and Mobile Broadband Services" - here.

Seamless Access, a "Mobile Internet Gateway" integrates a number of services that allows mobile operators to control, manage, optimize, filter, charge and provide value-added services to mobile internet and mobile broadband users. Data traffic flows reaching the gateway are examined for their application type (with or without DPI), subscriber’s service plan and other conditions and then steered (routed) to the relevant service elements (one or more).

Such integrated system, with multiple functions in a single solution (and even single physical device, usually a blade system), under a single management facility (a policy server) presents a great value to the operators, vs. implementing a standalone device for each function.

Of course, with today's mobile internet traffic, the system has to sustain much higher volumes than we have seen in the past.

Alfa (Lebanon) Uses Openwave for Traffic Shaping

 

Openwave (NASDAQ:OPWV) reported quarterly results yesterday (here). Revenues were disappointing at $40.1M, compares to $49.7M in previous quarter and $44.7 on the same quarter last year. Shares dropped by 13.6% on Thursday, with nearly 8 times the average trading volume.

During the conference call (transcript  here) Openwave's CEO, Ken Denman, mentioned that "In the quarter we also signed a deal with Lebanese mobile operator, Alfa, which is upgraded to Integra to help them address bandwidth challenges head on by shaping their data traffic. With Integra installed Alfa can eventually monetize their mobile traffic ahead of the competition." .

Alfa (owned by the Orascom Telecom since February 2009) has over 1M subscribers. The site shows only GPRS/WAP technologies as available for their Mobile Internet service (here)

Openwave, that was focusing on mobile messaging has shifted in the recent quarters to a more comprehensive mobile data gateway solution. As mobile operators are seeking multi-function elements, mobile equipment vendors have to integrate more and more functions into their offering, as there will be no room for single-function standalone boxes. We can see this direction taken by many vendors, line Comverse (see "DPI – Recent Product Announcements, New Player" - here), Bytemobile and Flash Networks moving from optimization solutions to service gateways,  the merger between Mobixell and 724 Solutions (here).

DPI and traffic shaping is certainly one of these required integrated functions. For Openwave, this is somehow accomplished by the Media Optimizer, which includes a "Dynamic Bandwidth Shaping: Adjust the optimized media bit-rate delivered to the subscriber based on available network bandwidth".

While it does detect video traffic, the web site does not mention the detection of other important protocols (such as P2P file sharing) - so it seems that the DPI functionality is pretty basic. Openwave launched the Media Optimizer on February (press release - here), focusing on video traffic management.