Skyfire is a software firm specializing in mobile video optimization, browser extensions leveraging cloud to improve the mobile internet experience for consumers and operators. Founded in 2007 and headquartered at Mountain View, CA, it has raised a total funding of $40.8 million from Matrix Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Verizon Ventures, Panorama Capital and Trinity Ventures.

The key buzzword for mobile operators in 2014 is NFV – network functions virtualization. Its deployment is underway on networks worldwide, and it is fundamentally transforming how networks expand and how services will be delivered to consumers in the future. NFV architectures are typically touted as a means of offering significant reduction in capital and operating expenditures, and there's little question that this is true. Reductions in these expenditures remain a chief and primary driver for moving away from proprietary hardware-driven networks.

Yet there is another huge motivator that's only now beginning to show itself as a key driver behind operator enthusiasm for shifting to NFV: service velocity, and the resulting democratization of applications and services that come from a NFV architecture. Prior to NFV, mobile operators had an all-too-real incentive to minimize the number of mobile applications they deployed, because every new application required a new piece of hardware, and would have to be brought in separately, tested separately and implemented separately. This process is exceptionally difficult and complex to manage.

In the recent days of hardware-driven environments, it often was not worth it for an operator to buy or deploy an application with an unpredictable number of users – for instance, a solution for the enterprise, a solution for MVNOs, or one targeted at a particular user sub-group. The fear was always that there might be stranded hardware with only a small number of users on it, and; therefore, a surefire money-loser. However, when an operator deploys virtual machines, they are allowed to be much more custom and less risk-averse, enabling them to deploy specific applications they might not be able to justify if they'd otherwise have to buy new hardware and go through all the incremental effort and cost of bringing it online.

A cloud-driven, NFV-centric approach allows for a quick response to changes in demand for applications. Let's say an operator launches a sports video application for soccer/football, a sport that happens to drive its peak traffic only around a couple of events per year or even every four years. Cloud-based NFV architectures let operators flexibly "burst" capacity to the cloud to ensure a high level of quality for users who only wish to watch the World Cup, the Champions League final and the Real Madrid/Barcelona match live on their devices, but who generally consume at otherwise normal levels during the rest of the racing year. Operators may find that they need to triple capacity overnight for these big events, and only a NFV architecture allows them to do this in a rapid and flexible manner.