Allot Closing San Diego Operations Two Years After Ortiva Buyout

Israel’s Allot Communications (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ALLT]]) is shutting down its San Diego-based operations, which came with the 2012 acquisition of Ortiva Wireless, a spokeswoman confirmed today.

About 20 employees are affected by the shutdown, according to an e-mail from Maya Lustig, director of communications for Allot, which is based near Tel Aviv, in Hod Hasharon. Ortiva, which specializes in optimizing video streaming across wireless networks, had 41 employees in San Diego when the deal closed.

“Further to our continuing goal to best support and answer our business and customer needs, Allot decided to begin a process of transferring and centralizing all video knowledge regarding markets, products, and support to our headquarters in Israel,” Lustig writes in a note today. “We aim to complete this process by the end of this year and as a consequence, we are gradually closing our facility in San Diego. We believe centralizing our video capability will enable us to continue to improve the solutions, services and support we provide to our customers.”

Allot optimizes data traffic and performance over both IP and mobile broadband networks, providing its technology for service providers, carriers, and networks operated by large corporations and other organizations. Allot’s hardware platforms and software applications apply its deep packet inspection technology to turn broadband pipes into smart networks, so that other Internet services can be rapidly deployed. The technology also can be used in surveillance of individuals.

Ortiva was founded in late 2004 to advance technology from the UC San Diego lab of Sujit Dey, an electrical and computer engineering professor who also served as Ortiva’s chief technology officer. Dey did not respond to an e-mail query earlier this week.

Lustig writes, “Allot Communications views video-related solutions as a core part of its offering to its customers. As part of this view we have developed many different solutions in this area— solutions for video-caching, video-optimization, video-analytics and others. The operation and development of most of these solutions is done mainly from Allot’s headquarters in Israel, while part of the video-optimization development is done from our facility in San Diego.”

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.