Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Juniper to Acquire Ankeena for CDN Capabilities

Juniper Networks agreed to acquire Ankeena Networks, a start-up based in Santa Clara, California, for its online media delivery technology. The companies have been collaborating for several months and Juniper plans to leverage Ankeena software to offer high-performance content delivery networking and "3 Screen" media delivery solutions for the mobile and fixed service providers. The solution allows network operators to provide highly-optimized video delivery services using their own infrastructure.


Juniper said the financial impact of this transaction is expected to be immaterial with consideration at closing of less than $100 million. Additional terms of the transaction were not disclosed.


At this year's Mobile World Congress, Juniper Networks introduced its Media Flow, a caching solution developed by Ankeena Networks that optimizes mobile and fixed networks for fast, efficient video and rich media delivery. Media Flow software enables smooth adaptive bit streaming at the service edge of the networks. Expected to be available in Q2 2010, Media Flow will include a Juniper VXA Series content delivery engine and Ankeena software to provide video and content delivery up to 10Gbps per engine.


Ankeena's systems combines media storage optimization, multi-tier caching and rate based delivery mechanisms to deliver large number of concurrent media streams at different data rates with an extremely high aggregate bandwidth. Ankeena's Media Flow Director ensures that users receive a smooth-viewing experience regardless of the viewing device and varying network conditions. Ankeena's supports various adaptive streaming technologies. The company calculates that its Media Optimized multi-tier caching technology provides up to a 10-to-1 reduction in the number of servers needed to deliver the same amount of media, with a similar reduction in transit network and media delivery costs.
http://www.juniper.nethttp://www.ankeena.com

  • Ankeena is headed by Rajan Raghavan (CEO and co-founder), who previously co-founded Xambala, where he developed the company's vision for the XML, security and financial industries. Prior to Xambala, Raghavan founded and served as CEO of RealChip Communications, where he established the company's fabless ASIC and VOIP segment strategies.


  • Ankeena's other co-founders include Prabakar Sundarrajan (CTO), who was previously at Citrix Systems, NetScaler and Exodus Communications; Jaspal Kohli (Chief Architect), who was previously served as Principal Architect at Yahoo; and Kumar Narayanan (VP of Engineering), who was previously served as Director, Engineering in the Data Center Switching and Security Technology Group at Cisco Systems.


  • Ankeena was incubated by Clearstone ventures and backed by investors including Trinity Ventures and Mayfield Fund.