Thursday, September 1, 2011

Bytemobile T 3000 series & Unison update

Bytemobile released this week a new platform (T3000) and a new product (T3100).
With more than 40 operator deployments, Bytemobile is the leader in the video optimization market. The new platform is launched to allow Bytemobile to address the intelligent traffic management market .

Mikko Disini, in charge of the new T 3OOO series and Unison platforms discussed with me the rationale behind the introduction of the new product and how it complements Unison.

T3000 series has been created in an effort to provide more monetization options for mobile broadband operators. For those familiar with Unison, which is essentially a web and video proxy and optimization gateway, T3100 expands beyond browsing to proxy and manipulate all traffic, including UDP based applications, P2P, video chat, RTSP, etc..
While Unison remains a software based solution, on off-the-shelf IBM blade center, T3000  series is a purpose built IBM hardware based appliance. T3100 combines load balancing, DPI, PCEF and traffic rules in one package. Bytemobile is planning to introduce new products on the T3000 platform in the future.

Mikko commented that the rationale behind the hardware based approach is to be more channel-friendly. " It is easier to deploy, package, explain, it is an easier sale".

My opinion is that Bytemobile makes a smart move to expand their product portfolio with new verticals. While there is a large level of overlap between Unison and T3100 today, Bytemobile can upsell their installed base with purpose-built solutions. While in the past, Unison was a Swiss Army knife, for a market who was looking for a quick solution, that had a bit of everything, the growth of the traffic is forcing many vendors to separate applications to have more granular scalability.


With T3000, Bytemobile moves more decidedly into the DPI, load balancing, PCEF space than with Unison. Additionally, moving to a hardware appliance model is going to enable them further to resist price erosion, reusing the Unison tactics of bundling several applications and features together with different market prices and models.
What remains to be seen is how effective the strategy is going to be in acquiring new channels, beyond IBM, NSN and TechMahindra now that T3000 is sure to encroach on some bigger players such as F5 and Cisco... or maybe, this is the strategy?

No comments: