BitBand finds U.S. partner in Myrio

Israeli appliance server developer BitBand, which has been among the more successful vendors in the nascent interactive IP TV market, is ready to attack the U.S. market via a partnership with middleware vendor Myrio.

BitBand, which is providing both appliance-servers and software to Italy’s FastWeb among others, will integrate its Vision family of appliance-servers and Maestro Content Management suite with Myrio’s TotalManage content and subscriber management application as well as the Myrio Interactive set-top box client application. The companies will demonstrate the combined solution for the first time next week at Supercomm.

"Myrio is very much focused on the U.S. territory so it sort of works well," said Ervin Leibovici, CEO of BitBand, which is funded by a number of VCs including Sequoia Capital, which is jointly owned by Sequoia Capital and Cisco Systems. "We like their approach and we’ve got a similar vision on how to get market share."

Target number one will be independent telcos, a market in which Myrio already has a significant footprint. Leibovici said BitBand is looking at other partnerships in the U.S. and already has signed alliances with Calix and Paradyne along with a more limited agreement with Net to Net. The partnership with Myrio will be much tighter than any access vendor unions.

"If you look at the access side, the integration is really at an arms length," Leibovici said. "We go out with a gigabit Ethernet face and we don’t really care who the access provider is as long as they can support that interface. It wouldn’t be a totally false conclusion that once we’ve had success in the U.S. that people are going to take notice in other locations."