Today, really yesterday, LiveQoS announced that it had acquired Openera for an undisclosed amount.¹ LiveQoS has built technology to enhance network QoS (Quality-of-Service) and real-time application performance within wired LAN, WiFi, 3G/4G, and the public Internet. Their main offering is their proprietary software, IPQ, which analyzes and adapts to the performance of both managed and unmanaged networks.² So what does that really mean?

Owing to the uniqueness of the company, there are no quick ways to explain what IPQ and LiveQoS does – Not the “Pandora for Restaurants” or “Uber for Cats” or anything like that. LiveQoS does something completely novel. Although the company does not exclusively serve the enterprise, it seems to be the major use case.

So, LiveQoS enhances network and real-time application QoS, but why? Well the enterprise, slowly but surely, is inching away from the LAN and intranet networks in favor of the cloud for enhanced mobility – focusing on the use of laptops, tablets, and smartphones. This movement increases flexibility, yet it degrades the predictability of network and real-time application performance and QoS; especially true when using 3G/4G networks. Further, the wide array of mobile devices that access the company network adds another layer of complexity. So in pursuit of application uniformity and – to rip off Microsoft a little bit – the same experience across all devices, LiveQoS built IPQ.

Essentially, IPQ works to provide uniform – in the case of slow networks, as uniform as possible – and reliable application performance across any network to any device. At its core, IPQ serves as a network optimizer:

IPQ works by sensing the network conditions (type of loss), type of application, type of devices and technologies used on the network edge. IPQ then intelligently applies optimizers to improve traffic quality by reducing packet loss, reducing latency, and generally improving the user experience. The best part is that IPQ is adaptive — when network conditions change, so do the optimizations that are applied in order to ensure the best QoS possible.

– LiveQoS IPQ Product Page

How does Openera fit in to LiveQoS?

Openera is a sort of, as TechCrunch called it, “IFTTT for the enterprise.”³ This may be a bit misleading, however, as the company is primarily concerned with email and email attachments. In a nutshell, users connect Openera with their email service, cloud storage provider(s), and set up filters and triggers – similar to IFTTT.⁴ Openera quickly – in near-real time according to their website – tags, organizes, and auto-files email attachments wherever the triggers and filters designate, usually a cloud folder or file. Openera also includes a powerful search function.

Much like LiveQoS, Openera was not exclusively for the enterprise, but that sort of functionality is perfect for a large company. The utility of Openera, in the case of the enterprise, is perfectly illustrated by the TechCrunch article referenced above:

The problem with content management systems today is that it’s the company that cares where the files are, not the users. They’re not motivated to move them to the right repositories when they know how to find them in their inbox. But the larger a company grows, the more pressing the need is to locate and organize corporate documents – especially for compliance purposes.

– Sarah Perez, TechCrunch

The acquisition makes a lot of sense for LiveQoS on many different levels. In the press release, Martin Horne, CEO of LiveQoS, notes that, “Much like Onavo – on the consumer side – offers compression for Facebook, Openera enables LiveQoS to offer compression to the mobile business user in addition to the speed and security we already offer.”⁵ The Openera team will be incorporated into LiveQoS.