PacketZoom is expanding to Europe and the Middle East to help accelerate app performance in the region and wants to utilise a network of resellers to penetrate markets such as Germany, Italy and Israel.

The move comes just over a month after the company announced it was setting up shop in Southeast Asia.

CEO Shlomi Gian told Mobile World Live PacketZoom selected several companies who are currently reselling content delivery network (CDN) systems for the web, to supplement their offering with PacketZoom’s mobile app performance solution, hence offering a complete package for web and mobile apps.

Israel office
He also said a new office is being set up in Tel Aviv, as the city “offers a global tech hub for the company with lots of talent to choose from and is a leading market in EMEA in mobile penetration and innovation.”

The company hired Amos Ben Yaacov as general manager EMEA to oversee growth and bring its app analytics, controls and acceleration technology to developers in the region.

“I have experienced first hand the frustration that comes from slow app load times and infuriating disconnects throughout Europe,” said Yaacov.

“PacketZoom was built from the ground up for the unique needs of mobile apps, creating a much more effective and reliable solution to address the needs of the market,” he explained.

Yaacov previousy worked for Cotendo, a content and application delivery network service provider.

PacketZoom already has customers in Europe, including Wave, a location application based in Spain.

Its CTO Pablo Clemente explained the app is designed to be used on the go, which means “cell carrier changes, transitions from Wi-Fi to data or vice-versa, loss of cell reception, etc, which imply connection losses, application programming interface errors and retries.”

Maintaining connections
He said these issues translate to higher loading times, and the company integrated PacketZoom’s in-app networking technology, which specialises in accelerating content delivery by handling reconnects and creating a mobile express lane between the app and the server.

PacketZoom’s Mobile Observatory – a report on mobile networks and app performance around the globe – indicated a high number of network disconnects experienced by app users over cellular and Wi-Fi networks in countries including Germany (where an average of 11.9 per cent of app sessions were impacted by disconnections) and France (6.7 per cent).

The report also showed apps in several European countries have plenty of room for improvement when it comes to average response time and transfer time.