Openet, which cut its teeth handling a mind-boggling number of transactions daily for Verizon Wireless, AT&T, BT, Orange and other wireless carriers, has already got its foot in the door with two of the top four U.S. MSOs and is using The Cable Show as its coming out party to the rest of the cable industry.
Openet chief marketing officer Mike Manzo said its quiet work with its two MSO customers (demurely unnamed, of course) helped the vendor gather enough data to architect commercial products specifically for the cable market. All Manzo would say of Openet’s MSO customers is that the two are at different stages of involvement, and using different Openet product sets.
The new products, to be introduced in coming months, include systems for Audience & Engagement Measurement, Convergent Usage Measurement and Interactive Services Fulfillment.
The cable industry is based on subscription usage, but as MSOs look to expand and monetize their on-demand offerings, as they start offering more cross-platform services, and as they move into mobile services (WiMAX, Wi-Fi hotspot networks, cellular phone service, etc.), they have to be ready and able to handle transaction-based usage.
What Openet brings to the party, and what is not otherwise available in the cable industry, Manzo explained, is the ability to handle transaction volume no cable operator has ever dealt with before – literally billions of transactions a day. Openet handles 15 billion transactions a day for Verizon alone, Manzo said.
The new cable-oriented products build upon Openet’s FusionWorks product suite, which enables real-time, highly scalable processing of network events and transactions.
The Audience & Engagement Measurement system for the cable market provides the ability to measure subscriber activities across all video services, including linear and non-linear viewing data and click-streams associated with interactive television (iTV) services. The solution enables operators to collect, aggregate, enrich and distribute usage data and subscriber profile information in real-time.
The Interactive Services Fulfillment element allows operators to collect interaction information from EBIF and tru2way applications and forward the data to a fulfillment server in order to respond to real-time subscriber requests.
Targeted for high-speed data services, Openet’s Convergent Usage Measurement solution enables service providers to capture, collect and aggregate data and voice usage and distribute the data to downstream systems. With Openet’s support for convergent networks, MSOs can now collect data across different service platforms. This enables business intelligence initiatives and ensures that data can be used not only for real-time responses, but also to create new revenue streams.
