April 1, 2010 was the ninth anniversary of the launch of Bytemobile's operations in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA). Our first office was a garage in a private residence in Sheffield Park, Sussex. Our first customer was Vodafone UK, where we deployed web optimization for laptop traffic in 2001.
Flash forward to May 2010. Our mobile internet infrastructure solutions are deployed in the networks of the leading wireless operators throughout the region – Vodafone, T-Mobile, Orange, Telefónica, O2, KPN, TeliaSonera, H3G, Mobilkom Austria, Orascom, and Zain, to name a few. We have approximately 120 employees across multiple functions on station in the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Poland, Greece, the United Arab Emirates, and other countries.
As one of the company's first employees in Europe, I am pleased to have been part of this growth and success. As the leader of the company's EMEA sales teams today, I am proud of our broad market footprint and enduring customer relationships.
Needless to say, business conditions for our customers have changed dramatically in the last couple of years. Web traffic on their networks has grown in response to the widespread deployment of 3G technology, the accelerated penetration of high-end smartphones like the iPhone and the Android, and the proliferation of increasingly richer applications and services – especially multimedia. Now, video play is overtaking web browsing, driving what our tier-one customers have characterized as a 300%-plus increase in overall data traffic year over year.
Next – the iPad, which will provide a real-time case study in the paradigm shift of multi-year network upgrade cycles lagging behind aggressive monthly growth in content and usage. A key lesson of 3G – which will become even more pronounced with the roll-out of 4G - is that consumer demand for data inevitably rises to fill the bandwidth available for it.
On May 11, Bytemobile will sponsor an Informa Telecoms & Media webinar on 'Meeting Consumer Expectations of the Mobile Internet Experience'. Dez O'Connor, head of Mobile ISP Domain Development at Deutsche Telekom, and Mike Hibberd, editorial director of Informa's Telecoms.com, will join Jeff Sanderson, our head of Pre-Sales in EMEA and Latin America, for a panel discussion of the various ways in which operators can deliver a superior user experience that will enable monetization of the data traffic surging through their networks.
I invite all of you to attend this webinar and to follow up with your Bytemobile account manager or other contact with questions and comments. In the same spirit, I would like to call your attention to Bytemobile University, which offers a range of live and web-based courses designed to help our customers deploy, use and grow Bytemobile solutions most effectively in their networks. Please check out the certification program and student testimonials to determine how you can utilize Bytemobile University to achieve maximum efficiency and productivity from your deployments.
The mobile data explosion is well under way, and Bytemobile has a comprehensive portfolio of solutions to address everything from traffic optimization and policy management in the core to value-added services in the data center. Your Bytemobile account team – fully supported by company resources across all functions and senior management – stands ready to help you manage the challenges of today while seizing the opportunities of tomorrow.
Ian Sandman
Vice President and General Manager
EMEA
