Qualcomm takes on Europe

Europe is about to get a taste of one vendor it's not used to dealing with: Qualcomm. While it has been making some in-roads on the old continent with UMTS, Qualcomm is still much better known as the CDMA carrier's vendor, so the fact that it has suddenly become the content delivery platform provider for three GSM carriers in Europe will probably come as a surprise to the wireless community there, those three carriers included.

Qualcomm just bought U.K. content platform provider Elata, and with that buy Qualcomm's presence in Europe just got a lot bigger. Orange France, Optimus and Hutchison 3G's 3 now join the global CDMA carriers getting their downloads from Qualcomm.

Qualcomm has more than just a European presence in mind, though. It plans to push BREW onto the GSM world, and Elata's platform will help them do it. In a few months, Qualcomm will have a BREW module available for GSM carriers, and in a year it plans to migrate Elata's entire management and delivery system to BREW, creating a unified platform that distributes apps over all networks, underlying access technology aside.

Contact me at kfitchard@primediabusiness.com.