Optimization Market: Li Ka-shing and Motorola Invest in Onavo

   

Tzahi Hoffman reports to Globes that "Onavo Mobile, which is developing an app to compress data on mobile phones, has raised $10 million in a series B funding round .. The fundraising round was led by Horizons Ventures, the private investment arm of Li Ka-shing together with Motorola Mobility Ventures, the venture capital investment arm of Motorola Mobility Inc".

Onavo (see "Optimization Announcements: Onavo Offers "3rd Party" Compression Service" - here) offers saving in data roaming services to iOS and Android devices, with yet to be announced business model (here). 

Nevertheless, the company sees MNOs as partners, and says that (here) ".. Onavo increases operators’ revenues from data roaming services by bringing down barriers to usage and by offering more flexible data roaming plans, without changing the existing inter-operator agreements".

See "Data compressing co Onavo Mobile raises $10m" - here.

Sandvine CEO: "there could be some business in the large U.S. carrier wireless side in 2011"

   
Some interesting quotes from Sandvine's Q2 earning call (see previous post - "Sandvine Grows On Wireless Market Revenues" - here):

Dave Caputo (picture) - Co-Founder, President and CEO:

"with regards to the North American wireless story for the quarter, we won significant follow-on business with a couple of existing wireless customers. The one in particular in North America you'll see in our MD&A [see table below] Cricket Communications [see "Leap Wireless/Cricket New Service Plans"- here] was a 10% plus customer in the quarter. It absolutely was Service Creation along the lines of usage management, quota management that drove that piece of business"



Source: Sandvine MD&A



" the other big wireless business, which was not North American based was in Europe, was also Service Creation revenue generating for the service provider .. That was an existing customer"

"We believe that there could be some business in the large U.S. carrier wireless side in 2011. There’s lots of major opportunities both with the mobile and DSL providers, the large guys."

" I think it's rewarded us well to have a number of global distribution agreements with the likes Huawei, Alcatel-Lucent, Motorola and Nokia Siemens Networks .. they are largely fulfillment channels, and as witnessed with what happened in Q1 and Q2, where Telefonica [here] decided to change which partner they were buying that from, the constant in that was Sandvine"

"Asia Pac, we expect to – outside of Japan, to be a growing contributor .. and I would say there is quite a strong funnel of opportunity in that region, and we fully expect it to be a meaningful contributor to our business over this year and next and into the future, of course"

" our bookings were greater than revenues"

See it all - "Sandvine Corporation Q2 2011 Earnings Call Transcript" - here.

Sandvine - Record High Results - So Why the Plunge?

    

Sandvine reported yesterday record high quarterly results with revenues of C$22.4M and GAAP net income of C$2.0M (non-GAAP1: C$3.7M), and 9 new customers. See some charts below.

See "Sandvine Reports Q2 2010 Results" - here.

Despite the nice results, Sandvine shares fall more than 9% during Thursday's trading. A possible explanation is brought by Eric Lam, from the FINANCIAL POST, quoting Tom Astle, analyst with Dundee Capital Markets:

“It’s making progress with its product and customer diversity and it’s a leader in an important product category with a rock solid balance sheet, but we remain challenged on finding a path to medium term profitability .. The company reported its lowest number of bookings [number was not provided - and Dave Caputo, Sandvine's CEO, did not provide any guidance for Q3] in eight quarters and below the sales level of the quarter. This is the first time the company has ever highlighted this metric"

See "Sandvine’s weak bookings cast doubt over prospects" - here.

Nevertheless, the company reported record level of RFPs in process, although said that "vast majority" of revenues come from existing customers and do go through an RFP process. The company also reported on Q2 deals resulting from the agreements with Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) and Motorola.

Mr. Caputo also hinted on some business with AT&T (see "DPI Deployments (10): AT&T Uses Openet for iPad" - here).