Ottawa-based mobile quality of experience company LiveQoS Inc. has acquired Openera Inc., also hailing from Ottawa, for an undisclosed sum.
In an announcement on Tuesday, LiveQoS said it would be acquiring Openera to make use of its file compression capabilities. The acquisition will see Openera’s employees joining the LiveQoS team, with Openera founder Peter Lalonde now named vice-president of cloud services for LiveQoS.
Openera’s main line of business was to scan users’ email inboxes, searching for important email attachments and then tagging and classifying them so users can track them down later. But LiveQoS was more interested in using Openera’s file compression to be able to speed up its own operations, says Martin Horne, the company’s CEO.
“We’re about making things happen efficiently on the Internet, whether that’s accelerating video traffic or the movement of business documents, and we do that through a whole bunch of different network optimizers we have developed,” Horne says.
“They have very good compression technology under the hood … And one of the network optimizers we hadn’t developed was compression … so that’s what attracted us to Openera.”
LiveQoS first worked with Openera on a contract before making its acquisition offer. Openera, which raised about $250,000 in initial seed financing in December 2012, was a graduate of FounderFuel, an accelerator based in Montreal focused on software as a service (SaaS) startups.
Mostly focused on the mobile space, LiveQoS plans on using Openera’s technology to make it more efficient for businesses to run their processes over third-party networks.
For example, a Canadian business traveler visiting the U.S. might need to have access to his or her phone, logging onto public Wi-Fi at places like Starbucks to prevent racking up roaming charges.
Although a traveler can use a virtual private network (VPN) to establish a secure connection, ensuring prying eyes aren’t looking at his or her documents, VPNs are often very slow. LiveQoS makes it possible for that traveler to access his or her documents quickly while keeping security in mind. And by acquiring Openera, LiveQoS hopes to reach out to businesses with a SaaS offering.
“What’s interesting about the cloud is the underpinnings are all the Internet. We make the Internet run faster. So our offerings can make a Dropbox upload work faster, just generically. So our cloud, if you connect to it, web browsing can happen faster. Accessing cloud storage can happen faster. Streaming videos can happen faster,” Horne says, adding he doesn’t believe anyone else is focused on this space.
“We’ve been at this 10 years, building the core pieces, just recently moving those capabilities into the cloud.”
Horne adds an announcement about Live QoS’ upcoming cloud services is expected to come out sometime in the next quarter.