Bytemobile: what's next?

Following the brutal announcement of Bytemobile's product line discontinuation by Citrix, things are starting to get a little clearer in term of what the potential next steps could be for their customers.

Citrix was market leader in terms of number of deployments and revenue in the video optimization market when it decided to kill this product offering due to internal strategic realignment. The news left many customers confused as to what - if any- support they can expect from the company.

Citrix' first order of action over the last month has been to meet with every major account to reassure them that the transition will follow a plan. What transpires at this point in time is that a few features from ByteMobile T-3100 product family will be migrated to NetScaler probably towards the end of 2016. Citrix is still in the process of circling the wagons at this stage and seems to be trying to evaluate the business case for the transition, which will condition the amount of feature and the capacity to reach feature parity.

In many cases, network operators who have deployed versions of ByteMobile T-3100 have been put on notice to upgrade to the latest version, as older versions will see end of support notices going out next year.

Concurrently, presumably, Citrix won't be able to confirm NetScaler's detailed roadmap and transition plan until they have a better idea in term of the number and type of customers that will elect to migrate.

In the meantime, ByteMobile's historical competitors are drawing battle plans to take advantage of this opportunity. A forklift upgrade is never an easy task to negotiate and, no doubt, there will be much pencil sharpening in the new year in core networks procurement departments.

Video optimization market has dramatically changed over the last year. The growth in encrypted traffic, the uncertainty surrounding Citrix and the net neutrality debate has change the feature set operators have been looking for.
Real-time transcoding orders have severely reduced because of costs and encryption, while TCP optimization, encrypted traffic analytics, video advertising and adaptive bit rate management are gaining increasing favors.

The recent T-Mobile USA "Binge On" offering, providing managed video for premium services is also closely followed by many network operators and will in all likeliness create more interest for video management collaboration solutions.

As usual, this and more in my report on video monetization.