BARCELONA – Mobile World Congress 2013 – Ericsson AB CEO Hans Vestberg kicked off his company's annual Barcelona bash early Monday morning with partnership, customer and product announcements and then fended off questions about M&A activities.Presenting to analysts and the media at the company's "village" in the MWC showgrounds on the western outskirts of Barcelona, Vestberg announced:

The CEO also talked about various portfolio and technology developments introduced and announced during the past year, including the increasing focus on OSS/BSS (following the acquisitions of Telcordia and ConceptWave), greater market traction with the Smart Services Router, video-related activities (underpinned by the technology brought on board with the acquisition of Tandberg TV) and its Service Provider SDN initiative. (See Ericsson Gets Trendy for MWC.)With so much recent activity based around technologies on which Ericsson has spent billions of dollars in acquiring, does this mean Vestberg is looking to make further major acquisitions to keep the innovation ball rolling at the company? Or is the M&A streak now over?In answer to Light Reading's question, Vestberg rightly pointed out that there is much innovation and R&D focus on the company's core mobile infrastructure competencies and not just around acquired attributes. But he also noted that Ericsson's M&A strategy is to "fill gaps" with purchases. "I'd rather put $1 billion into R&D or services development, but if an acquisition can speed up time to market we will look at M&A," he noted. With so many gaps filled, an obvious focus for Ericsson's next deal would be around SDN/virtualization technologies that could hasten the vendor's developments in the emerging key area of network functions virtualization (NFV), where it is has products in the pipeline but also where it is trailing the likes of NEC Corp. (See V Is for Virtualization.) — Ray Le Maistre, International Managing Editor, Light Reading