Allot buys video optimization specialist Ortiva Wireless

Allot Communications purchased video optimization specialist Ortiva Wireless (a 2011 Fierce 15 award winner), adding another component to its mobile service optimization platform.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Allot CFO Nachum Falek told analysts on the company's first-quarter earnings conference call that the price was less than 10 percent of Allot's cash position, which would work out to a figure less than $16.5 million. Allot said it will integrate Ortiva's solution into its own service gateway product or will sell it as a standalone solution.

"Any mobile operator deploying 3G and above technology would be interested in deploying a video optimization solution," he said. Allot's Global MobileTrends report, released in February, found that video streaming traffic grew 88 percent in the second half of 2011, and is now gobbling up a 42 percent share of all global mobile bandwidth.

Falek said the acquisition will help complement Allot's deep-packet inspection solution, and that the company will spend the next several months integrating Ortiva's solution into its own. "We see the service gateway product as essential into providing intelligence into mobile and fixed packet cores," he said.

The deal was rumored for weeks. The Mark, an Israeli publication, reported last week that the deal was imminent, without citing its sources. In an interview with FierceWireless, Jonathan Gordon, Allot's director of marketing, declined to comment on how long Allot was developing the deal.

Ortiva, of course, is not the only video optimization player in the market, and its competitors include the likes of Bytemobile, Flash Networks, Openwave, Radware, Radisys and Vantrix. Ortiva's solution apportions the right amount of bandwidth to each subscriber, according to the company, and sends just enough video data to enable continuous playback instead of sending the entire file. It shapes a video to match real-time RF network conditions using transrating, which adjusts bit rates to variable bandwidth conditions and helps avoid network "noise." The solution is content-aware and delivers the video without quality degradation, the company said.

Ortiva's Tier 1 customers include Sprint Nextel (NYSE:S) and Vodafone Portugal, and the company was backed by Intel Capital, Comcast Interactive Capital, Artiman Ventures, Avalon Ventures and Mission Ventures. Gordon declined to comment on what kind of business Allot will pick up with the acquisition or whether Sprint is still an Ortiva customer.

For more:
- see this Allot/Ortiva release
- see this Allot release
- see this Broadband Traffic Management post
- see this The Mark article (translated via Google Translate)

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