Allot to acquire Flash Networks for $110 /$120 M?

This is the latest rumor from Globe. Allot, who has raised almost $80M a month ago and was rumored to be acquired by F5, then to discuss acquisition of Mobixell or PeerApp last year, has a $500M market cap. Flash Networks has raised over $61M.

The resulting company could be booking about $120M in sales and be profitable.

Allot, in a briefing with Jonathon Gordon, Director of Marketing, two weeks ago was noting: " Our policies focus more and more on revenue generation. With over 100 charging plans surveyed in our latest report, we see more and more demand for bundle plans for social networks and video. We can already discriminate traffic that is embedded, for instance, we can see that a user is watching a video within a facebook browsing session, but we cannot recognize and analyse the video in term of format, bit rate, etc...Premium video specific policies raise a lot of interest these days."

No doubt, the acquisition of an optimization vendor like Flash Networks can solve that problem, by creating a harmonious policy and charging function that actually manages video, which accounts for over half of 2011 mobile traffic globally.

As discussed here and here, video optimization becomes an attractive target for telco vendors who want to extend beyond DPI and policy. Since video is such a specialized skill, it is likely that growth in this area will not be organic. It is likely that the browsing gateway / DPI / PCRF / Optimization segments will collapse over the next 2 years, as they are atomized markets, with small, technology-driven under-capitalized companies and medium -to-large mature companies looking to increase market share or grow the top line.