Tuesday, February 7, 2012

PeerApp: “Caching is the future of Optimization”

   
Few days ago I met Shmulik Bachar, VP of products and marketing, PeerApp, in its R&D site.

PeerApp, according to Frost and Sullivan recent research, leads the transparent cache market (see “F&S: Transparent caching market to Reach $708M by 2015; PeerApp Leads” – here). In 2011, the market had estimated revenues of $140M.

Some of the Q&A we had:

Q: Who do you see now in the caching market?

A: As direct competitors we mainly see Blue Coat. Note that we are also selling through OEMs, which includes Allot Communications and BTI Systems.

Q: What about the cache offering from Juniper, Cisco and the video optimization vendors?

A: These companies do not compete with us directly. They use caching as internal mechanism in their solutions, but not as a solution for optimizing Over the Top (OTT) traffic, as we do.

Q: We saw recently some announcements of integrated Carrier CDN and transparent caching solutions. Are the two will finally become one?

A: In many cases, carriers like to see one solution. This is why we announced a joint solution with Edgecast (here), and Verivue, who came from CDN solution side is now adding transparent caching (here). Transparent caching and CDN provide the carrier with similar benefits, although the technical solution for transparent caching and CDN is different.

Q: What is the business case for transparent caching? It is still about bandwidth savings?

A: It is no longer just savings, except for specific regions. The main goal now is to improve the subscriber’s quality of Experience (QoE) and monetize OTT services.

Q: Monetize? How?

A: One example, implemented by some of our customers, is the ability to sell higher tiers of service (usually volume-based) knowing that caching will enable better QoE.

Q: How about PeerApp? Where is it going?

A: We continue to focus on caching. It is the future of optimization, both for fixed and mobile operators. I believe that the different Adaptive Bitrate technologies (from Apple, Microsoft and Adobe) will make the other real-time/network based video optimization technologies (see here) redundant. Caching has real value, for bandwidth savings, QoE improvement and monetization.

PeerApp is doing very well, we closed a $8M investment last year (here) and we are working on additional OEM opportunities to expand our reach to other elements of the core network.

1 comment:

  1. Interesting. Is smoothness of non-cached data vs jittering of cached one (as shown on capture) is typical or accidental?
    Is 5:1 ratio between cached and uncached data is "best" or typical?
    And lastly, Adaptivity is certainly great approach,but reaction time ot changing conditions (sometimes upto 10 secs) certainly should beimproved, taking into account that significant percentage of video traffic only gets few seconds to be dismissed by user.

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