Eurobites: Nokia Buys 3D Network Planning Tool

In the same week that it offered its conditional approval to Telefónica Deutschland GmbH 's acquisition of E-Plus Service GmbH & Co. KG , the European Commission has now given the green light to Vodafone Group plc (NYSE: VOD)'s purchase of Spanish cable operator ONO . The Commission concluded that the transaction did not raise competition concerns, as the two companies' activities are largely complementary. (See ONO Says Yes to Vodafone.)

Thorsten Dirks, the current CEO of E-Plus, has been named as CEO of the newly created Telefonica Deutschland/E-Plus entity. According to Bloomberg, Dirks is something of a maverick, with a penchant for undercutting his rivals. (See Euronews: KPN to Sell E-Plus for €8.1B.)

Vodafone has signed a joint venture agreement with Irish utilities firm ESB, which will allow the mobile giant to deploy fiber on ESB's existing poles and ducts, initially reaching 500,000 premises in 50 towns across Ireland. The pair plan to invest €450 million (US$614 million) in creating an FTTP broadband network, offering speeds from 200 Mbit/s to 1,000 Mbit/s.

Nordic operator Tele2 AB (Nasdaq: TLTO) has teamed up with NetComm (ASX: NTC) to create new M2M/IoT opportunities in selected vertical markets. NetComm will provide the M2M devices that provide the network connection and remote management components, while Tele2 will provide the network. (See Tele2, NetComm Forge M2M Partnership and IoT: More Things, More Challenges.)

Deutsche Telekom AG (NYSE: DT) has struck a deal with cloud services provider Salesforce.com Inc. , which will see DT's T-Systems International GmbH unit become the primary reseller for Salesforce in Germany and the data center provider for Salesforce's planned German data center. The partnership will allow DT's corporate customers to receive Salesforce solutions directly from the Telekom Cloud.

BT Group plc (NYSE: BT; London: BTA) is collaborating with WAN optimization specialist Ipanema Technologies to examine the potential of the vendor's ip|engine as a virtual network function. "NFV has real potential as a technology, which is why we have a wider program in place to determine exactly which network functions can be virtualized. Effectively managing and controlling application performance remains absolutely critical to BT's enterprise customers, so we welcome the opportunity to explore the future uses of virtual ip|engines from Ipanema," said BT's managing director of Research & Innovation, Dr Tim Whitley, in a prepared statement. According to Ipanema, the two companies will seek to demonstrate the potential of virtualized WAN optimization and application performance functionality. Ipanema first announced the virtualization of its technology in March 2013. (See Ipanema Goes Virtual.)

UK mobile joint venture EE has launched a suite of apps it thinks will help small businesses improved their productivity. The launch comes on the back of a survey EE commissioned which, says the operator, found that more than 5 million small business employees in the UK think that they would be more productive with "apps tailored to their job." Probably not this then.

— Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading