BREW PROGRESSES IN EUROPE, BUT STILL SEEKS GSM FOOTHOLD

Qualcomm last week picked up its first carrier win for its binary runtime environment for wireless platform in Western Europe, a milestone for the vendor that would have been all the more sweet if the customer, Nordisk MobilTelefon, had been a GSM operator. Instead, Qualcomm racked up another contract with a CDMA carrier, its traditional customer base for BREW. But Qualcomm officials said the deal inches the firm closer to its overarching goal, making that elusive GSM win only a matter of time.

Nordisk is Qualcomm's second BREW customer operating in the 450 MHz frequencies, high-coverage bands that many European carriers are using to deploy wireless in rural areas. Zapp Mobile in Romania adopted BREW last year, cementing the content distribution platform's dominance over traditional CDMA technologies. Now the Nordisk win moves Qualcomm closer to the heart of Europe, where Qualcomm hopes it can generate a buzz for its technology among the dominant GSM operators.

“Certainly that Holy Grail would be a Tier 1 operator,” said Bob Briggs, vice president of global business relations and operators for Qualcomm Internet Services. “We're still seeking it out.”

While Nordisk — which serves rural communities in Sweden — and Zapp are small, Qualcomm is counting on them not only to show the value proposition of its platform, but to lay the foundation of a BREW content and developers community in Europe, Briggs said. BREW's developer community currently contains numerous international developers, all of whom create content for both Java and BREW. Briggs said those developers will be releasing their first BREW-based applications in Europe and incorporating regional-specific content into applications developed for other markets. But Briggs conceded that the size of the European BREW market is still too small to generate a huge pan-European content push. That momentum will come only when Qualcomm lands its first Tier 1 GSM operator.

To do just that Qualcomm has begun optimizing its BREW platform for GSM. Last year it bought Trigenix, a company that built user interface software for GSM handsets, and this summer it acquired Elata, which produces a content distribution platform for GSM that Qualcomm plans to integrate into the BREW UI.

It's built Java support directly into BREW, and it plans to support Symbian applications, allowing carriers to keep their current content libraries and distribution deals while slowly incorporating BREW applications into their decks. Unlike in the traditional CDMA markets, Qualcomm is encouraging carriers to take BREW in increments or parts, and that new openness is garnering interest from GSM carriers for the first time, Briggs said.

Still, analysts and Qualcomm's competitors in European distribution have doubts as to whether Qualcomm can overcome the GSM community's distrust for the vendor, a holdover from the bitter exchanges of the GSM/CDMA technology wars of previous decades.

“There's an embedded bias against them,” said Andrew Cole, chief analyst for A.T. Kearney's telecom and media practice. “That said, I've learned never to underestimate Qualcomm.”