Elematics secures $10 million

Investment firm Warburg Pincus rewarded the vision and progress of Beaverton, OR-based Elematics, with series B funding this week that, along with contributions from company management, helped raise Elematics’ financing to date to $25 million.

Elematics was founded as QOptics in late 2000 by CEO Clive Cook, executive chairman Alex Mashinsky and Jeff Parness who wanted to build a software-based solution for inter-carrier operations, including network management and control. The ultimate result was the Intelligent Network Control Plane, which the company formally launched in November.

The INCP adds a control layer between a carrier’s optical network elements and its operations supports systems that improves interoperability between legacy and next-generation network elements as well as between carrier networks. The INCP’s core applications enable automated provisioning, signaling, inventory auto-discovery and what the company calls Layer 1, optical virtual private networks (VPN). It provides a common control plane and OSS integration for multi-vendor and multi-carrier optical networks.

The new funding will be used to develop the product for general availability and to support deployments in customer environments, Cook said.

“The industry has to change and there are only a few technologies or ideas that can fundamentally change it, he said. “I think Warburg believes, as we do, the control plane architecture will be one of them.”

The INCP is currently in trials with two North American Tier 1 carriers. Cook expects both trials to be completed near the end of the first quarter. The product will be generally available shortly thereafter.

Elematics’ solution represents a radical change in network architecture because it requires the introduction of an additional logical layer. However, Cook said the product is built with partitioning technology that allows carriers to migrate specific portions of the network when they’re ready.

“You’re never going to get anybody to deploy something that requires a full-scale rip out. It just doesn’t happen anymore,” Cook said. “You have to develop a plan for staged deployment.”

Without a control plane, Cook said, it is impossible for carriers to take full advantage of either the network or OSS infrastructures they have in place. Thirty years of growth and the more recent acquisition and merger activity have created networks so complex that carriers can’t manage them effectively.

“Sometimes 40% of a carrier’s assets are in the core. It is the most important part of their network and they are struggling to take the best advantage of that to help their business,” Cook said.