Crown Castle on Thursday beat analyst expectations in its fourth quarter earnings report. The company posted a 9 percent increase in quarterly revenue year over year to reach $1.03 billion, a 7 percent increase in full-year revenue to $3.2 billion, and a 4 percent increase in site rentals to $817 million. Wells Fargo noted service revenues of $215 million outpaced the firm’s forecast of just $165 million.
Crown Castle also gave its 2017 guidance a bump on the back of a recent deal to buy FiberNet from NextEra Energy. Crown Castle CEO Jay Brown said the transaction’s January close means Crown Castle now owns around 40,000 towers and more than 26,500 route miles of fiber in “key metro markets throughout the U.S.”
“We believe the expected substantial growth in demand for mobile data over the next several years provides us the opportunity to drive organic growth through higher utilization of our existing assets, while allowing us to deploy capital towards new assets that we expect will enhance long-term growth in our dividends per share,” Brown commented.
Cisco this week announced plans to acquire application performance management and analytics company AppDynamics for $3.7 billion. The move came one day before AppDynamics’ scheduled initial public offering.
Cisco SVP and General Manager of the Internet of Things and Applications Business Group Rowan Trollope said applications are now the “lifeblood of a company’s success” but noted it’s become harder to keep them running and performing well thanks to the “tangled web of disconnected, complex data that’s hard to understand.” The merger, he said, will help Cisco solve that problem.
“The combination of Cisco and AppDynamics will allow us to provide end-to-end visibility and intelligence from the network through to the application; which, combined with security and scale, will help IT to drive a new level of business results,” Trollope commented.
AppDynamics will continue to be led by CEO David Wadhwani as a new software business unit in Cisco’s IoT and Applications business, reporting to Trollope. The acquisition is expected to close in Cisco’s third quarter of fiscal year 2017, subject to customary closing conditions.
Hugo Barra, former Android executive at Google and leader of Chinese smartphone company Xiaomi’s global expansion efforts, has left the latter company in a jump to become vice president of Facebook’s virtual reality efforts.
“Hugo shares my belief that virtual and augmented reality will be the next major computing platform,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a post on the social networking site. “They’ll enable us to experience completely new things and be more creative than ever before. Hugo is going to help build that future, and I’m looking forward to having him on our team.”
Actility, a Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) company, and Abeeway, a geolocation system specialist, announced their partnership to develop and commercialize a flexible location solution for the IoT combining the precision of GPS with the low-power, long-range capability and low cost of LPWA networks enabled by Actility’s ThingPark IoT Platform.
The combination of LoRa network location and GPS is the first step toward true multi-mode Abeeway trackers which also combine WiFi network detection and Bluetooth beacon technology to provide precise location indoors. All of these capabilities will be integrated and accessible via a single, powerful, location API delivered via the ThingPark X platform, which is also capable of passing the data to customer cloud platforms, including IBM Watson, Microsoft Azure, and AWS.
“We’re delighted to be working with Abeeway to be pioneering this next evolution of IoT technology,” Actility CEO Mike Mulica said. “We believe that this capability is a game changer for many industries, including logistics, supply chain management, precision agriculture, utilities, and mining. It’s the ‘killer app’ for industrial IoT.”
Qorvo, a provider of RF solutions, announced it is the first RF supplier to join the China Mobile 5G Innovation Center—an alliance created to develop 5G solutions for China.
Qorvo said its membership in the China Mobile 5G Innovation Center complements the company’s range of 5G initiatives, including its involvement in the 3GPP 5G standards process and support for more than 20 5G field trials.
