Citrix Acquires CDN and Service Provider Analytics Company Skytide

Citrix has acquired privately held Skytide, an analytics platform used by content delivery networks and service providers to collect real-time analytics and reporting for traffic distribution, capacity utilization and bandwidth billing. Terms of the deal are not being disclosed and I haven’t heard any numbers mentioned but if I remember correctly, Skytide had raised less than $10M in capital since 2005. Skytide had been shopping the company for a while and didn’t have a lot in revenue, so the deal size would be small. Plus, Citrix didn’t even put out a press release on the acquisition, so they couldn’t have paid much. The company originally targeted content owners with their analytics platform but then migrated their business to the service provider market, targeting those who operate CDNs or resell wholesale CDN services.

Citrix plans to integrate Skytide’s technology into their ByteMobile platform, a company they acquired last year. Citrix’s mobile carrier solution provides content caching, policy management, deep packet inspection, and video and web traffic optimization technologies to help mobile operators shape traffic on their network. Through the acquisition of ByteMobile, Citrix gained what they say is the world’s largest installed base of video optimization and traffic management deployments inside 130 operator networks globally.

Citrix said that today, less than 5% of the world’s video traffic traverses mobile networks and addressing QoE for the other 95% requires sophistication in monitoring, measuring and managing the delivery of those videos over the CDNs that deliver video to most of the service providers, both mobile and fixed. Adding Skytide to their ByteMobile platform, Citrix believes they can enable operators to deliver the best possible video, audio and web experiences while ensuring optimum utilization of network resources. I’ll update the post if I hear any details on the valuation Citrix placed on Skytide.