Network equipment maker Ciena Corp said it expects strong growth in cloud computing and higher use of smartphones, and forecast stronger-than-expected revenue for the current quarter.

Ciena (Hanover, MD, USA) shares jumped as much as 15.5 percent on the Nasdaq on Thursday morning. Shares of rival Finisar Corp (Sunnyvale, CA, USA) were up 5 percent while those of Juniper Networks Inc (Sunnyvale, CA, USA) were up about 1 percent.

Spain’s Telefonica and Russia’s MegaFon have announced details of a new strategic partnership designed to lower operating costs and spur innovation.

The deal brings together Spain’s former state-owned monopoly and the third-biggest mobile-phone operator in Russia, behind MTS (Moscow, Russia) and VimpelCom (Amsterdam, Netherlands), and will see the two companies team up on procurement to lower the cost of equipment purchases and also exchange technological know-how.

The first two days of this week’s CTIA Wireless Show in Las Vegas have been marked by a flurry of M2M announcements, with partnerships between MVNOs and network operators emerging as a major theme. M2M Zone provides a round-up of the most important news items.

New Zealand Telecom is to ramp up its activities in the burgeoning market for cloud services following a $96.5 million ($82.5 million) takeover of infrastructure and data center specialist Revera.

The New Zealand telecoms incumbent said it would fund the acquisition through cash and existing borrowing facilities and expects the deal to close in May.

It will continue to run Revera (Auckland, New Zealand) as a standalone business, providing customers of Gen-i –New Zealand Telecom’s ICT services division – with access to additional cloud capabilities and data center capacity.

Chinese equipment maker Huawei expects its revenues to grow at a compound annual rate of 10% over the next five years, despite the current slowdown in the equipment market and its difficulties in the US.

Huawei (Shenzhen, China) provided the forecast after reporting that net profit for 2012 was 32% higher than for 2011, at RMB15.4 billion ($2.48 billion), with revenues up 9%, to RMB220.2 billion.

“In 2012, Huawei met business performance expectations through improved operational efficiency,” said Guo Ping, Huawei’s rotating and acting chief executive.

London:

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M2M specialist Numerex has announced that its customer base has surpassed the 2 million mark, with surging growth providing evidence of the current momentum in the M2M industry.

The company, which provides M2M services and technology for enterprise and government customers worldwide, says that it took several years to reach the 1 million mark but only two years to double its customer base from that level.

Swedish operator Ericsson has signed an agreement with German software company SAP for the joint marketing and sale of cloud-based M2M services to enterprises around the world.

The partnership will combine Ericsson’s M2M platform expertise with enterprise services from SAP (Walldorf, Germany) and is designed to overcome some of the barriers to the adoption of M2M technology.

Rostelecom hopes mobile broadband will offset declines in its core fixed-line calls business as it seeks a greater share of Russia's increasingly competitive telecoms market, CEO Alexander Provotorov told Reuters.

The state-controlled former long-distance call monopoly was beefed up in 2011 through a merger with several regional operators to challenge private players in more lucrative market segments such as mobile, broadband and pay TV.