There was a time in Openwave Systems’ history – back in the late ’90s when it was known as Unwired Planet – when it wanted to encourage more people to use and browse the mobile Internet.
Since then, a lot has changed, and Openwave, in its current iteration, is trying to help operators cope with all that mobile data traffic they’re seeing now and will see in the future.
The irony isn’t lost on CEO Ken Denman, who took the helm in 2008 after having served on the Openwave board for four years. Openwave didn’t exactly cause the “data tsunami” to which Denman refers, although it might have wanted to do so. In the early days, engineers were at the beginning of the mobile Internet movement, reformatting Web pages for mobile phones. It was cool at first, but it was a painful experience, and WAP would forever be epitomized in the “WAP is crap” mantra. “The WAP hype got a little ahead of itself,” Denman concedes.
Still, Openwave managed to make a name for itself as an innovator. Then followed a series of acquisitions, name changes and hard times that left the company looking like it was floundering for a purpose. Was it searching for growth? “Chasing growth might be the way I would describe it,” Denman says.
Last week, Openwave launched its newly designed Web site and corporate blog. This week at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, it’s a full-court press, with the company showcasing its latest context-aware mediation offerings and what Denman calls “smarter services” for operators. Openwave will host two exclusive roundtables on topics such as “4G Strategies for Success” and “Data Mediation and Mobile Analytics.” It’s co-hosting two invitation-only receptions, and executives will be meeting one-on-one to discuss their solutions.
What’s changed in the intervening months and years? Besides Openwave’s management, the company shed divisions like the Musiwave business, which it sold to Microsoft in 2007. In 2008, Purple Labs acquired Openwave’s mobile phone software business.
In addition, the industry itself has changed. 3G networks are more widely deployed, and 4G promises more video and data. When you combine the new devices and faster networks, “you get to the point where we are today, which is users coming onto mobile in larger and larger numbers,” Denman says. “We’re seeing a data tsunami hit mobile networks … This is a fundamentally different ball game.”
All the discussion, analysis and study that Openwave has done leads executives to believe they’re on the right track. By some estimates, 75 percent of mobile network traffic within the next couple years will be video content. SMS is starting to flatten, but MMS is lifting up, and social networking is all the rage. When you combine it all together, along with the need to cross various generations of networking gear, the implications are clear, Denman says.
Nowadays, Openwave at times is going up against competitors in the big equipment maker segment like Ericsson and Nokia Siemens Networks. In some other places, it runs up against companies like Comverse or Bytemobile.
The company recently announced second fiscal quarter net income of $990,000 – in contrast to a net loss of $64.2 million it had in the same quarter a year ago. That net loss for the year-ago December quarter included an impairment to goodwill of $59.5 million. Openwave shares this week were trading in the range of $2.10
Time will tell, and Denman has heard the rumors that would have Openwave dry up and blow away. But “we’ve more than stabilized our footing,” he says. And the company aims to prove it with hard examples in Barcelona this week.