IBM has just swallowed up Vallent (itself a fairly recent merge of Watchmark, Comnitel and Metrica). Add NetCool and this is a pretty compelling platform for mobile telco QoS.
Back at Argogroup, we often pondered which of the biggies would join the mobile quality dots first – an Agilent?, an HP?, an Ericsson? IBM was never on my list, but if you look carefully, they can do more in the area of mobile than some realise.
What does this mean for the mobilist in the street or the grass roots of the mobile web? Well nothing immediately – but I think this sort of tectonic M+A shows that the mobile medium as a whole (by which I mean much, much more than voice) is under strong scrutiny in the powerful boardrooms of the world.
Which is only going to be good for us all – capitalism’s OK, you know…
And IBM has just a little bit of web in their genes 🙂 so it will be interesting to see whether that, together with their growing mobile muscle, will further influence the medium’s evolution towards the dream we all have in mind.