Mirantis CEO Adrian Ionel

Intel, Dell (two other vendors) and West Summit Capital kicked off initial Series A closing announced in January.

In a statement, Mirantis CEO Adrian Ionel said the new cash infusion will help the company integrate its Fuel configuration and deployment technology with “key players in IT.”

Fuel is a toolset that Mirantis open sourced in March. At that time, Ionel described it as the company’s “secret sauce — the automation library — that we used to set up some of the largest OpenStack adopters — Paypal, Webex, The Gap and others.”

As I reported last year, Mirantis made its name mixing and matching the best OpenStack components from multiple vendors into cloud solutions for customers.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Cloud computing 2013: how to navigate without a map
• Examining open hybrid cloud options for the enterprise
• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond

Of course, they would say that — more video over LTE is good for the carriers. It lines their pockets and it puts strain on the networks, which means they buy more gear from Ericsson. Okay, with that caveat out there, let us look at some of the salient data points from Ericsson’s report:

• Total global smartphone subscriptions hit the 1.2 billion mark in 2012. We will see 4.5 billion smartphone subscriptions by the end of 2018.
• Smartphones accounted for around half of all mobile-phone sales in Q1 2013, compared with roughly 40 percent for the whole of 2012.
• So it is no surprise that mobile-broadband subscriptions are growing really fast — during the the first three months of 2013, they grew 45 percent faster than the same period in 2012 and now stand at around 1.7 billion.
• More smartphones means more demand for data, ergo, data traffic volumes doubled between Q1 2012 and Q1 2013. Data traffic growth between Q4 2012 and Q1 2013 was 19 percent. Ericsson forecasts that the data traffic on mobile networks will grow 12-fold by 2018.
• During 2013, overall mobile data traffic is expected to continue the trend of doubling each year.
• Of course, a lot of this growth will come as a result of faster networks. Ericsson expects 60 percent of the world’s population to be covered by LTE in 2018.
• Across the world 20 million new LTE subscriptions were added in Q1 2013.
• In North America, driven by the U.S., LTE will account for majority of subscriptions in the region in 2016, growing to around 70 percent in 2018.
• In comparison, by 2018, LTE will penetrate around 35 percent of the subscriptions base in Western Europe.
• LTE subscriptions are expected to exceed 1 billion in 2017.
• So what do we with all that speed? Spend more time on social networking: an average of up to 85 minutes per day in some networks. Looks like that Facebook addiction of ours is going to become super expensive!
• And we don’t really spend that much time talking on the phone. Voice traffic growth between Q1 2012 and Q1 2013 was 4 percent. Ouch!
• Ericsson says that web browsing and social networking will each constitute around 10 percent of the total data traffic volume in 2018.
• Of course, we watch video — a lot of it.  According to Ericsson, the video traffic on mobile networks grew by 60 percent annually.
• On some networks, video consumption is on average 2.6GB per subscription per month. That should make the network operators break into evil grins — more of our money into their pockets.
• Of course, worried about its carrier overlords, Ericsson makes no mention of over-the-air communication apps in this report.

Now for more details about the mobile world at large:

• Global mobile penetration was at 90 percent in first quarter of 2013 and mobile subscriptions now total around 6.4 billion. However, the actual number of subscribers is around 4.5 billion, since many people have multiple subscriptions.
• China alone accounted for around 25 percent of net additions, adding around 30 million subscriptions during first quarter of 2013.
• India added over 10 million, as did Indonesia. Brazil and Nigeria both added over 5 million subscriptions during the first quarter.

We will parse some of the data in separate posts later.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• A look back at mobile in the third quarter
• Mobile 2012 and beyond

In the course of breaking up, sometimes it’s simpler to shed shared assets. Ericsson and STMicroelectronics are in the process of doing just that – having already decided which partner gets what out of their cash-hemorrhaging joint venture, ST-Ericsson, the companies are now seeing what they can get for the leftovers. And in this case, part of that portfolio entails ST-Ericsson’s global navigation satellite system (GNSS) business.

The ST-Ericsson GNSS portfolio includes handset receivers for interacting with both the U.S. GPS system and Russia’s GLONASS location service. On Tuesday, the companies said they had signed a “definitive agreement” to sell the assets and intellectual property surrounding this business. That includes 130 staffers in Daventry (UK), Bangalore (India) and Singapore.

The deal will apparently “reduce the joint venture’s cash needs by approximately $90 million.” There is, however, one rather important detail that’s missing.

Who’s buying?

ST-Ericsson is being almost entirely opaque on this point, saying only that the team has “found a new home at a leading player in the semiconductor industry.” Which leaves us with something of a guessing game.

The current crop of ST-Ericsson GNSS receivers are part of the joint venture’s NovaThor system-on-a-chip platform, but that’s now been cancelled due to the break-up. And ST-Ericsson has never publicly disclosed who its other GNSS customers are.

It may or may not be relevant to note that one of the more recent ST-Ericsson GNSS receivers, the CG1960, has a very small form factor and has been tailored for low-powered applications, such as in smart watches and cameras. With wearables set to be a boom market, this technology could be quite attractive to certain players.

It’s unlikely Qualcomm is the buyer, as it already has a rich GNSS product portfolio. Samsung has been using SkyWorks in the last year or so. It could possibly be Texas Instruments, which is making a big push into embedded systems, including wearables.

But really, your guess is as good as mine.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• The big theme of MWC: How to live in a connected world

Ericsson is a keen HetNet proponent and the Swedish networking giant has just launched a commercial trial of what it calls the City Site “integrated solution” in Nanning, the capital of China’s Guangxi region, alongside China Mobile. The four-meter-high (13-foot) package includes a standard Ericsson base station in this case, along with an integrated multidirectional antenna.

The “Omni Antenna” in question is rather short-range (up to a couple of hundred meters) and relatively close to the ground, which fits in nicely with what Ericsson is trying to achieve here: network densification, a central tenet of HetNet architecture.

HetNets will need to involve not only a variety of cell sizes and types – from macro-cells to pico-cells to Wi-Fi offload points — but also cells at different levels and layers, in order to solve the challenges presented by specific locations. Tall buildings are a challenge when you’re trying to serve thousands of people on street-level, and this kind of thing may be part of the solution.

But densification isn’t the only thing that’s going on here. Ericsson’s City Site design also allows add-on modules for video ad screens, clocks, touchscreen real-time information displays and so on. The company told me this could “provide high performance broadband coverage together with fulfilling a city’s needs for de-clutter, aesthetics and add-on applications like information or advertising.”

This is a good indicator of how we can expect to see our ever-increasing mobile broadband requirements change the cityscapes around us. I’m not sure it really amounts to de-cluttering, though — ads aside, there’s something to be said for discreetly sticking cells on lampposts and other existing street furniture.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The big theme of MWC: How to live in a connected world
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• The Internet of Things: What It Is, Why It Matters

The deal is focused around 600,000 smart meters in Sweden. But E.ON is one of the largest power and utility companies in the world and operates in 30 countries with 26 million customers, so clearly its a relationship with a lot of potential.

Ericsson competes with GE, Siemens, ABB and others to sell software, services and hardware to utilities and power companies. Increasingly utilities and power companies are interested in buying more data analytics tools as their networks are becoming IT networks that need to monitor, digest, and analyze data to run more efficiently. As global electricity grids add more clean energy (solar panels and wind turbines), and energy storage (battery farms), better data analytics and predictions tools will also be needed to keep the grid stable.

Some of the power gear vendors are turning to the big data startup leaders for partnerships around the latest analytics. For example, earlier this week Siemens announced that it’s working with data warehouse veteran Teradata.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The growth and promise of the LED market
• Key technologies for the smart city
• Big data meets the smart grid

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos

In his annual letter to shareholders (PDF) on Friday, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, reiterated his company’s rage to update features and functions (and then cut prices) on Amazon Web Services.

According to Bezos, AWS which he characterized as a “clear example of internally driven motivation” put out 159 new features and services in 2012 and cut prices 27 times since launching 7 years ago. (Frankly, 27 sounds like an undercount to me, but he’s the boss.)

He also touted Amazon’s commitment to enterprise customers. Amazon has

“… added enterprise service support enhancements, and created innovative tools to help customers be more efficient. AWS Trusted Advisor monitors customer configurations, compares them to known best practices, and then notifies customers where opportunities exist to improve performance, enhance security, or save money. Yes, we are actively telling customers they’re paying us more than they need to. In the last 90 days, customers have saved millions of dollars through Trusted Advisor, and the service is only getting started. All of this progress comes in the context of AWS being the widely recognized leader in its area – a situation where you might worry that external motivation could fail. On the other hand, internal motivation – the drive to get the customer to say “Wow” – keeps the pace of innovation fast.”

The lastest tidbit for enterprise users was this week’s addition of support for Microsoft Hyper-V support in Amazon’s Storage Gateway. For more on Bezos’ letter, here’s  PaidContent’s Laura Hazard Owen’s take.

Bezos’ letter comes at a time when more observers question whether AWS really is the low-cost option when it comes to non-variable (inelastic) production workloads — as opposed to development and test jobs — but that’s a quibble. Until one or more of the OpenStack crowd or, more likely, Google Compute Engine, hits its stride, AWS remains the public cloud to beat.

OpenStack: the ABM (Anyone But Amazon) alliance?

The OpenStack crowd is getting larger. This week — barring last minute delays at Monday’s board meeting — Juniper Networks and Ericsson — should be aboard the OpenStack Foundation as Gold members, as GigaOM reported Friday. Both companies were already sponsoring companies but board membership brings a bigger financial contribution and presumably more influence. With them in the fold and especially after VMware joined last summer, it’s become easier to list which vendors are not in the OpenStack ecosystem than those who are. And that list would be Amazon, Google, Joyent, Microsoft and Oracle.

OpenStack, when it was born more than 3 years ago was an attempt by Rackspace and NASA to build an open-source alternative to Amazon in the public cloud and to prevent VMware from leveraging its virtualization lock in enterprise data centers into the cloud. The effort, as measured by by third-party vendor support has exploded since then, especially after Rackspace turned over the reins to the OpenStack Foundation two years ago. Since then the floodgates opened with HP, IBM, Red Hat, Cisco, Dell, joining younger companies — like Cloudscaling, Nebula, Piston Cloud (see disclosure) on the effort. Let’s see, that would be Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle and Joyent. Or as Joyent CTO Jason Hoffman quipped — giving his company top billing OpenStack would be the “Anybody but JAMOG” alliance.

Piston Cloud updates

Perhaps seeking to beat the rush that’s bound to come next week at the OpenStack Summit, Piston Cloud (see disclosure) brought out Release 2.0 of its OpenStack cloud, or as InformationWeek called it “OpenStack on a stick.”

According to Informationweek:

“The customer sets a few configuration parameters on the cloud key memory stick, then inserts it into the USB port of a top-of-rack’s Ethernet switch. The system loads into the Linux server space of the switch, discovers the servers in the rack, and configures them into a system with virtual machine provisioning, pooled storage and networking and cloud management.”

Disclosure: Piston is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes Flight
• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond
• Infrastructure Q3: OpenStack and flash step into the spotlight

Both companies are already corporate sponsors but have applied to join the foundation itself and their applications will be voted on on Monday, according to the agenda for Monday’s OpenStack board meeting. That meeting kicks off the annual OpenStack Summit in Portland, Ore. A Juniper spokeswoman confirmed that company’s application. Ericsson could not be reached for comment.

Update: Mats Karlsson, VP of architecture and process for Ericsson, said the company brings an understanding of networking and telecom  to the table.  Stockholm-based Ericsson had already decided to offer OpenStack-based  services because it liked the open-source ecosystem and sees tremendous traction. The company has services in beta now with commercial roll-out slated for early 2014

Juniper and Ericsson are already corporate sponsors of the open-source cloud effort, but joining the foundation will give them them a seat on the board. the chance to win a seat on the board. It  also requires a funding committment of between $50,000 and $200,000. (The formula is pegged to company revenue per the OpenStack wiki.). Each of the eight top-tier Platinum partners –  AT&T; Rackspace IBM, HP, Nebula, Red Hat, SUSE, and Ubuntu — pony up $500,000 per year and must commit to a three-year tenure.

Other Gold members — the total number is limited to 24 companies — include Juniper rival Cisco Systems, Cloudscaling, Dell, Intel, Mirantis, Piston Labs(see disclosure), VMware and others.

Talk at the summit will no doubt focus on how  new features and functions of the Grizzly release of OpenStack can bring value to customers. Folks will especially be watching for new customer stories. Most of OpenStack’s case studies to date revolve around tech companies —  HP, Intel, Cisco/Webex — all of which are building OpenStack implementations for their own use or which they they want to sell. Now, with Grizzly being the seventh major release of code, it’s time to show OpenStack traction in the world beyond the tech bubble.

This story was updated at 8:45 a.m. PST with Ericsson comment.

Disclosure: Piston is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

The deal should go through in the second half of the year, the companies said in a statement on Monday. According to a separate blog post by Yusuf Mehdi, strategy head at Microsoft’s interactive entertainment division, the sale will allow Microsoft to “commit 100 percent of its focus on consumer TV strategy with Xbox” – bear in mind that the next-generation Xbox is expected to be unveiled in the coming months.

Mediaroom is a telco-oriented, customizable IPTV platform that should be a good fit for Ericsson, a company that already sells networking equipment and services – including IPTV equipment and services – to telcos. There are more than 40 existing Mediaroom customers, including AT&T (who brands it as U-verse) and Deutsche Telekom (Entertain). According to the statement, Ericsson will have a market share of over 25 percent if the deal goes through.

As is customary for such sales, the deal will be subject to regulatory approval in various countries. Microsoft’s Mediaroom division employs 400 people, who are based in Mountain View, California.

According to Ericsson SVP Per Borgklint, “future video distribution will have a similar impact on consumer behavior and consumption as mobile voice has had”, and the transferring staff that coming with the platform will give Ericsson “senior competence and some of the most talented people within the field of IPTV distribution”.

Here’s an excerpt from Mehdi’s post:

“We are proud of the world-class engineering and business achievements within Mediaroom. They have a rich history of driving innovation in IPTV. As early pioneers, they built the infrastructure to stream video on limited bandwidth, and today they enable multiscreen entertainment experiences for pay TV subscribers. Mediaroom has contributed to the evolution of TV and powers 22 million set-top boxes today in 11 million subscriber households.

“With the sale of Mediaroom, Microsoft is dedicating all TV resources to Xbox in a continued mission to make it the premium entertainment service that delivers all the games and entertainment consumers want – whether on a console, phone, PC or tablet.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room
• IPTV Market Snapshot
• OTT technologies and strategies for broadcasters

The report quotes unnamed “people with knowledge of the matter” as saying the two companies are in talks over the potential sale. Neither company would comment on the report when I asked them today, but the idea of the sale is perfectly plausible.

Mediaroom is a customizable platform that is mostly bundled by telcos, who want to take on more traditional TV service providers with their broadband services — customers include AT&T, Deutsche Telekom and Telus. As it also comes with DVR capabilities, Mediaroom is in some ways a competitor to TiVo .

According to Bloomberg’s source, Microsoft wants to focus more on delivering IPTV through its Xbox consoles. Swedish networking equipment vendor Ericsson, meanwhile, is all about servicing its telco customers, so the addition of Mediaroom to its lineup would make a lot of sense. The company could integrate the software with its existing IPTV managed services and systems integration portfolio – in February, Ericsson said it had signed 240 IPTV contracts with various service providers.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• What the shift to the cloud means for the future EPG
• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room
• How consumer media will change in 2013

With STMicroelectronics having indicated back in December that it wanted out of its chipmaking joint venture with Ericsson, and with Ericsson having politely declined to buy the half it didn’t already own, it was only a matter of time for ST-Ericsson. The question was how it would go, and now we know the answer: perhaps predictably, Ericsson will take on the modem side of the business and STMicro will take on other existing products as well as some of the manufacturing facilities. The rest will be shut down.

As for jobs, around 1,800 employees and contractors will transfer to Ericsson (mostly in Sweden, Germany, India and China) and around 950 to STMicro (mostly in France and Italy). Approximately 1,600 employees are likely to find themselves without a job – 50-80 of them in Germany and 400-600 in Sweden.

Former ST-Ericsson CEO Didier Lamouche announced his resignation a week back and, according to Monday’s announcement, his replacement from 1 April will be current COO Carlo Ferro. Ferro won’t be in place for long, though, as STMicro and Ericsson said they expected the breakup to be completed during the third quarter of the year.

Ericsson chief Hans Vestberg said his company saw a great future for the “thin modem” side of ST-Ericsson (the term refers to multimodal, low-power modems that draw their intelligence from the associated mobile application processor), which Ericsson will now run as a standalone business:

“Ericsson continues to believe that the thin modems hold a strategic value to the wireless industry. With this move Ericsson will create a highly focused ‘thin modem only’ operation — an area in which both parents have invested significant amounts to establish industry leading technology and intellectual property. Initial customer contacts give support to the belief that our modems will meet the requirements of the manufacturers in the rapidly growing smartphone and tablet market.”

ST-Ericsson had been hemorrhaging money for many quarters. Indeed, it had never been profitable since being established in 2008, but it was particularly damaged by the negative fortunes of its big two customers, Sony-Ericsson (now entirely a Sony affair) and Nokia, which used ST-Ericsson chips in its low-end phones but never adopted the NovaThor system-on-a-chip (SoC) platform for its Windows Phones, as ST-Ericsson claimed it would back in 2011. Nokia’s Lumia handsets continue to use Qualcomm chipsets, as do most other high-end smartphones these days.

ST-Ericsson had only just unveiled its latest NovaThor chipsets last month at Mobile World Congress. However, a spokewoman for Ericsson told me that these new chipsets — namely the the L8540 and L8580 lines — are being immediately discontinued. The ageing U-series, such as the U8500 that was announced in 2011 and that still powers midrange devices such as the Samsung Galaxy SIII Mini, will continue under STMicro’s auspices, she added.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• Analyzing the wearable computing market
• The big theme of MWC: How to live in a connected world