Qualcomm announced that it has acquired mobile content delivery software provider Elata for $57 million in cash. Elata is based in the United Kingdom.
This acquisition comes only a week later than Qualcomm’s acquisition of wireless broadband company Flarion, for which it paid $600 million.
“The benefits of this acquisition are threefold,” said Peggy Johnson, president of Qualcomm Internet Services. “…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.” According to a press release,
By combining Elata’s wireless content delivery system, the senses product, with Qualcomm’s BREW solution, operators have access to an extensive and modular offering of wireless data solutions and services. This new unified delivery system also allows operators with existing wireless data solutions to improve and expand upon management, delivery and marketing of wireless content, while maintaining backwards compatibility with their current devices through open standards interfaces.
The new unified delivery system is platform-agnostic, allowing operators to consolidate all of their content services with support for all device platforms. Under a single service delivery framework, a broad array of content can be unified and managed, including ringtones, wallpapers, and BREW, Java, streaming and OMA-compliant content – for the full range of feature phones and smartphones on operators’ WCDMA ( UMTS ), GSM and CDMA2000 networks.
“Both Qualcomm and Elata share a common vision of helping operators and service providers to advance the proliferation of feature-rich mobile content in Europe and beyond,” said Elata CEO Stephen Dunford. “We will be able to bring the benefits of our joint technologies to worldwide markets, either by strengthening an operator’s existing service delivery offering or by helping to quickly establish a solution that increases the choice, uptake and revenues from wireless content.”
Elata software will continue to be available through Qualcomm. Full support for the software will also continue to be available.
Chris is a staff writer for murdok. Visit murdok for the latest ebusiness news.
