Don't Forget the Basics: All About Speed

by John Giere, SVP Products and Marketing

Last week’s announcement of IBM acquiring Netezza only adds to the 90’s internet-like hype focusing on the analytics sector. More and more companies are realizing the importance and “monetary” value in collecting, aggregating and understanding the piles of data left behind as we live increasingly digital lives.

In the mobile space especially, powerful analytics tools are key to the promise of better targeting, higher CPM, etc. Many of the claims out there sound good but actually fall short delivering value in return for the level of investment. In particular, today’s offers fall short in mobile video harnessing contextual data to deliver a better user experience.

Openwave recognized early on that traffic optimization would benefit greatly from contextual data. Today our web and video optimization are market leaders because they take into account the content, device, network and policy behind each request. The result is a feature like Content-aware Compression that compresses video differently depending on the action in the video. We can analyze video content dynamically before applying our optimization algorithm so that a relatively stationary talking-head news clip will be compressed more than a sports clip with no perceivable difference to the human eye.

A recent study by Nokia Siemens uncovered an interesting trend of lower customer loyalty in more mature markets. According to Michael Matthews, head of strategy and business development at Nokia Siemens Networks, customer churn has grown over the last two years, especially in regions where mobile broadband and smartphones have taken off. “The silver lining,” says Matthews, “is that price is becoming less critical as a churn trigger. Without a doubt, access to mobile broadband has changed people's priorities and the expectations they have of their service providers.”

Another study published this week by Equation Research sheds some light on these expectations. It’s all about speed. According to the report, one-third of all web users also use a mobile device to access the internet, and over half expect their mobile content to load as fast, almost as fast, or faster than their home computer.

At Openwave, we spend lots of time and effort to help make the mobile web run faster because we understand that speed is one of the most crucial factors in a superior mobile experience. But so is quality. Our web and video optimization solutions are tightly integrated with powerful analytics so that rich content doesn’t compromise speed and speed doesn’t compromise quality.