Intelligent CIO Europe Issue 12 | Page 18

NEWS LINK Mobility Group AS strengthens position in French market L INK Mobility Group AS (‘LINK’), one of Europe’s leading and fastest growing providers of B2C mobile messaging and mobile services, has entered into a definitive agreement for the acquisition of French mobile messaging company, Multiwizz SAS (‘Multiwizz’). Multiwizz was established in 2009 and is located in Aix en Provence, France. The company holds a strong position in the French market and is one of the leading mobile messaging and SMS marketing providers in France based on the company’s two platforms; Envoyer SMS Pro and Hexa SMS. Arild E. Hustad, CEO of LINK, commented: “I am happy to announce that we have now taken our second step into the French market through the acquisition of Multiwizz. This big European market experiences strong growth and high demand for advanced mobile messaging and solutions services. Multiwizz has a strong customer base of more than 5,000 customers in France and we see good potential to grow the overall customer base in France through increased penetration of both existing and new services. LINK has now grown its customer base in Europe through organic growth and acquisitions over the last 12 months from 10,000 to more than 20,000 customers.” Blaise Thiercelin, CEO of Multiwizz, said: “I am very proud that Multiwizz joins a group like LINK Mobility Group that will provide more valuable mobile solutions and services to our clients, enabling the company to pursue its growth. Multiwizz’s commercial and technical teams are excited by this new opportunity to reinforce our customer satisfaction with new high-quality innovative services.” ////////////////// Orange launches LTE-M network in France and expands its offer throughout Europe A s part of Orange’s ambition to succeed in the field of connected objects, Orange has announced the commercial launch of its Long Term Evolution for Machines (LTE-M) network in France. The launch in France follows the opening of Orange’s first LTE-M network in Belgium in May 2018. Orange will launch further LTE-M networks in Spain and Romania by the end of 2018. The launches mark Orange’s progress in serving the connected object market and underline its commitment to deploy LTE-M and LoRa as its leading IoT technologies across its European footprint. deployed on Orange’s 4G networks, will address objects that are on the move, in buildings or underground places. It is therefore suitable for logistical monitoring, telemonitoring, remote assistance and fleet management. Furthermore, LTE-M technology benefits from all the features of 4G including security, real-time connectivity and international roaming, thanks to broad support of the technology from other operators worldwide and already integrates with future 5G standards. The combination of LTE-M and LoRa technologies will enable Orange to fully support the explosion in the IoT market and address the broad range of use cases. Orange will select the appropriate technology on a country-by-country basis. LTE-M, which is a technology specifically dedicated to connected objects and 18 INTELLIGENTCIO www.intelligentcio.com