Juniper Buys Blackwave for Internet Video Delivery

Juniper Networks is buying the intellectual property of Blackwave, which makes Internet video delivery and storage technologies.

The deal, announced Nov. 18, marks the second acquisition by Juniper this week and the latest move by the networking company to expand its capabilities in the highly competitive Internet video market, which is drawing the interest of such top-tier tech companies as Cisco Systems and Hewlett-Packard.

Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

Juniper officials said the will integrate Blackwave’s technology into their Media Flow Controller content delivery and caching offering, a product the company aquired in April when it bought Ankeena Networks.  

Juniper’s technology is aimed primarily at helping service providers, content providers and content delivery networks improve the video experience they can deliver to fixed and mobile devices.

"The acquisition of Blackwave technology continues Juniper's commitment to the new network by serving the rapidly escalating appetite for high-quality video from anywhere to any device, " Rajan Raghavan, vice president and general manager of Juniper’s Content and Media Business unit, said in a statement. "The Blackwave technology brings storage performance and scaling capabilities that, combined with the Media Flow platform and Juniper's high-performance networking systems, will provide a compelling solution for our customers who require scalable and efficient distribution of content and high-quality video over the Internet."

Blackwave makes its Blackwave Chorus software, the core piece of the company’s Blackwave System delivery platform. The software is designed to let video distribution companies deliver IP video over mulitple protocols. Company officials boast that a key differentiator is that Blackwave Chorus lets businesses scale their download and streaming capabilities as well as storage requirements as needed. Traditional delivery systems combine both storage capacity and performanc e capabilities, which means that if a company needs more bandwidth, it also needs to grow the storage capacity, a more costly proposition, according to Blackwave officials.

With Blackwave’s approach, companies can avoid having to overprovision bandwidth and reduce both capital and operational costs.

Blackwave’s technology will dovetail with Juniper’s Media Flow Director. The Ankeena deal gave Juniper a product designed to improve a user’s viewing experience by support a variety of video streaming technologies. Media Flow Director can detect available bandwidth and adapt the delivery accordingly, which helps eliminate any buffering and stuttering in IP video.

The Internet video space is a market of high interest to a growing number of IT vendors who see the rapidly increasing use among both consumers and corporations. This is fueled in large part by the massive adoption of smartphones and other mobile handheld devices, as well as the growing demand among businesses for such technologys as video collaboration. Cisco officials see video growing from about 50 percent of overall Internet traffic today to more than 90 percent by 2013.

Corporate video collaboration has been a focus on several key vendors this week, including Cisco and HP, which both expanded their visual communication offerings, and Microsoft with its Lync 2010 rollout, as well as smaller vendors like Mitel.