Arroyo tunes in new president, CEO

Video-on-demand vendor Arroyo Video Solutions today announced it has named former Catena Networks executive Rick DeGabrielle as its new president and CEO.

DeGabrielle, who has 20 years of experience in the networking market, most recently was vice president of sales and business development at Catena Networks, growing the company to $100 million in annual revenue before it was acquired by Ciena. Additionally, he has served in various executive positions with Network Equipment Technologies and Cascade Communications.

At Arroyo, DeGabrielle anticipates growing the company beyond its traditional cable operator market. Among the company’s financial backers are the venture capital arms of Comcast and Time Warner, though, that won’t present any issue, he said.

“One of the reasons they invested was because they saw the applicability of the technology across markets,” DeGabrielle said. “In addition to telco and cable we are seeing a lot of interest from cellular. There’s an awful good trend pointing in that direction because everybody wants to stream content.”

Arroy’s first product, Arroy OnDemand, is being positioned as a software play that separates the content ingestion and streaming functions. Because of that separation, DeGabrielle said the company is in perfect position to serve telcos that are setting up national head ends to serve their IP video networks. Additionally, the company’s solution can run on off-the-shelf hardware.

“We see ourselves very much as a software play and we see that as enabling personalized entertainment,” he said.

Getting deeper into the telco market, though, will require some partnering, potentially with large traditional telecom vendors. The company already has a partnership with IBM to integrate its software onto e-Servers. It also has set up a lab demo with Myrio (now part of Siemens) that is being evaluated by one of the larger service providers, DeGabrielle said.