UXP Systems and Motorola Mobility bested 35 other companies to win The Cable Show’s CIO.IT | Competition 2012 this week in Boston.
It’s the third time that The Cable Show has held the CIO.IT | Competition 2012, and the winners were selected by cable chief information officers.
The contestants presented their entries to major cable IT challenges before panels of cable CIO judges and a packed crowd of Cable Show attendees Tuesday at the Boston Convention and Exhibit Center. Their proposed solutions were judged based on merit in five categories: problem-solving, revenue enhancement or expense reduction, productivity, implementation, and innovation.
Competitors with the winning entries were:
- The cloud, service-oriented architecture (SOA) and cable – Gemini Waghmare, UXP Systems
- Big Data and analytics – Patrick Wright-Riley, Motorola Mobility.
The winners were chosen from a group of eight finalists whose projects had been selected for the final competition. Earlier this year, a selection committee of cable CIOs generated the finalists from a group of more than 35 vendors.
The award capped off a busy week for Toronto-based UXP. The company started the Cable Show on Monday with a presentation in Imagine Park and finished with the award on the last day of the show Wednesday morning.
At the show and in the competition, UXP demonstrated its Multi-screen Interaction (MINT) platform, which is an enabler of personalized multi-screen video, voice and messaging services. The platform works with existing operator IT and network services to seamlessly orchestrate, unify and personalize various operator services across smartphones, tablets and PCs.
The MINT system works with legacy back office equipment to enable multi-screen bundles, multi-screen home calls to various devices including tablets, and a personalization system that focuses on the individual and not the collective household.
“So much about what your seeing at this show, at least in our minds, is about seamless, personalized services, and not just video,” said UXP CEO Gemini Waghmare. “It’s not just about TV, it’s about how we connect on all services. In order to do that, you need to break two long-standing paradigms in the cable industry. The first one is you need to get beyond the household and know the individual, so we have a fit-gap approach for user lifecycle personalization.
“Once you know the user, and not just the house he’s living in, how do you bind and orchestrate a seamless experience? We have an orchestration engine that is service-agonistic that can apply itself to the existing cable operator’s ecosystem; whether it’s VoIP, voicemail, call history or IPTV. By deploying our system in a cable operator’s existing, or evolving, infrastructure, you now have a roadmap to extend your current and future services around individuals anywhere, anytime on anything.”
Waghmare said the bulk of the company’s 40 employees have backgrounds in telecom or cable back office, which means they’re very cognizant of how those systems work and very aware that cable operators don’t want to install entirely new systems.
“We respect the existing systems and extend personalization beyond them,” Waghmare said. “Our approach is to innovate by the legacy systems. It doesn’t require corporate upgrades, and because of that, it delivers unparallel time to market.”
Columbus Communications, the largest cable operator in the pan-Caribbean region, has implemented MINT and claims to be the first cable operator in the world to launch a true multi-screen bundle, under the “Flow-to-Go” name.
