Citrix has announced that it is expanding its business into the mobile infrastructure sector. Citrix is beginning the effort by acquiring Bytemobile, a company that provides mobile traffic optimization solutions. Bytemobile is a little over 10 years old and only has 300 employees. The company may be small, but it’s reach is large. 130 mobile carriers in 60 countries use Bytemobile’s technology to process more than 20 petabytes of data each day.

Bytemobile’s solutions use content caching, policy management, analytics, deep packet inspection and other optimization technologies to shape traffic as it moves across an operator’s network. The company’s various platforms can reduce payload sizes, manage data network congestion and prioritize packets (e.g. subscribers that exceed data limit have a lower priority) allowing operators to provide faster and more consistent performance to subscribers.

This is not the first time Citrix and Bytemobile have joined forces. At this year’s Mobile World Congress in February, Citrix and Bytemobile worked together to develop a product that helps carrier scale mobile networks using Citrix’s load-balancing solution, The ability for operators to balance and optimize network traffic is becoming increasingly important as subscribers consume increasing amounts of data over mobile networks. In fact, a study by Bytemobile in February showed that today voice only uses a small percentage of mobile bandwidth. Video accounts for 69 percent of traffic.

Citrix’s purchase of Bytemobile is part of a growing trend of networking providers expanding their portfolios to provide a more holistic set services as the market becomes more competitive. In the last couple of months, Citrix has acquired Virtual Computer, Inc, Podio and now Bytemobile in addition to introducing several new solutions.Competitors like Cisco have made similar moves. Cisco recently acquired video and content security provider NDS Group, optical interconnect technology provider Lightwire and ClearAccess.

New technologies are being introduced, data centers are larger and networking is growing more complex. Thanks to these trends, most industry observers expect to see huge changes taking place in the next five years. It will be interesting to observer how players like Citrix adapt in an effort to continue their leadership.