What’s up with… Kentik, T-Mobile, Cradlepoint, Huawei

• Analytics specialist Kentik banks further funding
• T-Mobile joins the CNCF ranks
• Cradlepoint takes another run at Europe
• Huawei CFO set for extradition

Fresh funding and cloud native engagements head up this platter of news snacks.

• Network analytics specialist Kentik has raised $23.5 million in a funding round led by Vistara Capital Partners, taking the total raised by the San Francisco-based company to $61.7 million. The company’s Network Intelligence Platform “for instant analytics and insights across cloud and hybrid environments” is used by the likes of Cisco, Dropbox, eBay, IBM, KDDI, Tata Communications and Zoom. “Over the past few months, many of our customers have experienced a 200% to 500% increase in traffic growth on their networks. With recent traffic growth, we now have real-time visibility into over 1 trillion traffic measurements per day across billions of users, and see every network connected to the internet, and every cloud and SaaS provider,” stated co-founder and CEO Avi Freedman in this announcement.
• T-Mobile, now the second largest mobile operator in the US, has joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a gold member. “Several years ago, T-Mobile embarked on a cloud native transformation journey as part of our commitment to providing the best experiences for our customers and maintaining best-in-class customer care,” noted Ramesh Krishnaram, director, Platform & Infrastructure Engineering at T-Mobile, in this anouncement. “We have been focused on driving towards a distributed service architecture and enabling our developer community to rapidly build, test, release, and operate software in a hybrid cloud environment. We are thrilled to join CNCF to help drive innovation in the ecosystem and gain greater insights into the Foundation’s strategy and project roadmaps.” AT&T is also a gold member, while Verizon is a silver member.
• Cradlepoint, which has developed a portfolio of 4G/5G/Wi-Fi wireless access routers and associated cloud-based management system for local/private network deployments and in-building connectivity, is ramping up its European activities with a number of senior appointments, plans to grow its European team further and a pitch aimed at the growing interest among enterprises in 5G and network edge. “We are confident, that when we come through this crisis, the rise of high speed wireless 4G Gigabit LTE and 5G networks will present huge opportunities for enterprises to cut the wire and build better, more agile and manageable networks. A huge number of ideas, innovations and new companies will be born out of the 5G movement globally, and Cradlepoint is at the forefront of this change,” noted the company’s senior VP for EMEA, James Bristow. The Boise, Idaho-based company, which recently launched its 5G-optimized wireless WAN edge router, previously announced a UK beachhead and EMEA expansion plans in 2016: This seems like a more optimum time for such an international move. 
• Huawei’s CFO Meng Wanzhou has lost her battle against extradition from Canada to the US to face charges linked to the violation of US trade sanctions, reports the BBC. The news follows further recent sanctions against the company by the US administration and rumours the Chinese vendor’s technology may be given the order of the boot by the UK government as soon as 2023.
• Revenues generated by vendors selling Open Compute Project (OCP)-certified equipment to companies other than OCP board members (which includes Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Rackspace) hit $3.6 billion in 2019, up by 40% year-on-year, according to a study conducted by research house Omdia for the OCP Foundation. That figure is projected to hit $5.3 billion this year and $11.8 billion by 2023.
• Sales of optical gear for data centre interconnect (DCI) connectivity increased by 13% year-on-year during the first quarter, according to research house Dell’Oro, which expects traffic volumes between data centres to continue to increase throughout this year as “people rely more on cloud-based services.” The DCI equipment market is dominated by Ciena, Cisco and Infinera, which between them accounted for 70% of the market during the first three months of this year. 
• The battle to produce premium movies now includes Apple, which is prepared to shell out a staggering amount of money to attract more users to its Apple TV+ service, for which subscriber numbers have not yet been released. It has reportedly landed a deal to fund Martin Scorsese’s next film, Killers of the Flower Moon, which has an estimated budget of $225 million and is set to star Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio. Netflix picked up the tab for Scorsese’s previous outing, The Irishman. Such numbers beggar belief…

- The staff, TelecomTV