What’s up with… HPE, Mobileum, Huawei

• HPE splashes $925 million on Silver Peak
• Mobileum acquires SIGOS
• Huawei reports 13.1% rise in H1 sales

M&A action and financial defiance comprise the leading pack in today’s news chase.

• HPE has thrown itself into the SD-WAN bullring with the $925 million acquisition of Silver Peak, one of the leaders in a crowded market. HPE says it will combine Silver Peak, which has more than 1,500 customers, with its Aruba division, which had already launched its own SD-WAN offering but little impact on the market. HPE's CEO, Antonio Neri, is pretty pumped about the deal, as you can see from the quote above. Silver Peak has been in the leading pack of the SD-WAN market runners and riders for a while, no matter which analyst house you turn to: Late last year IHS Markit Technology (now part of Omdia) had it holding fifth position in the global market, while Dell’Oro recently named it as one of the top five players in a market that was worth more than $1 billion in 2019. For more on HPE’s acquisition, read this press release.
• HPE isn’t the only company with M&A news: Mobileum, which provides tools to help operators with their roaming, fraud management and network security, is acquiring SIGOS, which specializes in roaming testing capabilities, for an undisclosed sum. This is the third acquisition that Cupertino, California-based Mobileum has made since it was itself acquired by Audax Group in late 2016: In October 2018 it acquired signalling firewall specialist Evolved Intelligence; and in August 2019 it bought fraud management firm WeDo Technologies. With SIGOS on board, Mobileum will boast more than 750 operator customers and have 1,800 staff. For more details, see this announcement.
• How badly has Huawei been damaged by geopolitical pressures and the Covid-19 pandemic during the first half of this year? According to the Chinese vendor it is thriving… It has reported a 13.1% year-on-year increase in revenues for the first half of the year to CNY454 billion ($64.87 billion), of which CNY255.8 billion ($36.55 billion) came from the sale of mobile phones and CNY159.6 billion ($22.8 billion) from network hardware and software. 
• Having acquired chip technology developer Arm for $32 billion in 2016, SoftBank is now considering a sale or an IPO for the unit, according to CNBC (citing the Wall Street Journal).
• Verizon is piloting Google Cloud Contact Center Artificial Intelligence in an effort to “deliver more intuitive customer support through natural-language recognition, faster processing, and real-time customer service agent assistance.”
• Analog Devices is becoming a bigger rival to Texas Instruments in the semiconductor market with the $20.9 billion all-stock acquisition of Maxim Integrated Products. The combination of the two companies looks complementary, as they don’t overlap too much -- Analog Devices develops chips for the industrial, communications and digital healthcare markets, while Maxim is known for its products designed for the automotive and data centre markets. The combined company will have annual revenues of about $8.2 billion. For more details, see this press release. 

- The staff, TelecomTV