Qualcomm buys Elata to gain BREW foothold in Europe

Qualcomm today continued its buying spree, adding U.K. mobile content delivery and management software maker Elata to its acquisition roster along with Flarion.

Though the $57 million cash deal is a pan-flash compared to the $600 million deal it struck with Flash-OFDM equipment maker Flarion last week, Qualcomm officials said the Elata deal is of strategic geographic and technological importance as Qualcomm seeks to expand its BREW mobile download platform into wideband CDMA and Europe. Elata already has Orange France, Hutchison’s pan-European UMTS carrier 3 and Portugal’s Optimus as clients, and is rapidly expanding in Europe as carriers launch 3G services, said Gina Lombardi, senior vice president of marketing and product management for Qualcomm Internet Services.

Elata currently provides a standards-based content delivery and management system, providing a single content repository for managing, launching and marketing for a carrier’s numerous application and content services. Lombardi said Qualcomm plans to integrate the Elata system into BREW, basically creating a unified platform-agnostic system that will support both BREW devices as well as any OS-based or Java-based phone—basically creating a GSM version of BREW. The integration process will take about year, Lombardi said, but in the next few months, Qualcomm will introduce a temporary module to Elata’s system, which will support BREW in the interim and allow content developers to begin developing to BREW’s APIs immediately.

“In a few short months, those carriers will be able to support BREW applications on their networks,” Lombardi said.

The move into Europe may bring Qualcomm face-to-face with Nokia, which launched what many industry experts consider to be a BREW GSM equivalent called Preminet last year. Nokia has announced only a few small carriers using the delivery platform, but it said many larger players have been evaluating the platform, including T-Mobile. BREW itself has enjoyed most of its success among smaller international CDMA operators, but the one big exception has been Verizon Wireless, the single largest CDMA carrier in the world.