P-cube fills void in IP service control

With fundraising and product development complete, Sunnyvale, CA startup P-Cube began taking its IP service control solutions product to market last week and announced yesterday a customer win with Japanese Internet service provider @NetHome.

P-Cube introduced a trio of products last week that run on its IP Service Control Platform. Insight, Encharge and Engage are the first in what is anticipated to be a broad suite of solutions for analyzing and controlling application layer traffic on high-bandwidth facilities in carrier’s IP-based networks.

Called Analysis, Billing and Control (ABC) solutions by P-Cube, the suite acts as an intelligent service layer that will give service providers control over abusive applications and users, bandwidth allocation for peer-to-peer, voice-over-IP and video-on-demand traffic and provide usage reports for billing and analysis.

“The peer-to-peer problem especially is huge and the pain point is here and now,” said Yuval Shahar, president and CEO of P-Cube. “There is no ROI in putting in new capacity just so more teenagers can download more movies than they can ever watch. So it has to be contained.”

P-Cube’s Engage solution controls bandwidth at the user and application level. It is this module that @NetHome deployed in its cable data network after a trial evaluation of the product’s traffic control and network optimization capabilities, according to a statement by @NetHome’s vice president of business development, H.M. Sohn.

The Insight solution provides application-level usage analysis that service providers can use for capacity planning, trend analysis and in identifying abuse and low-priority traffic. It also is used by mediation partners such as HP and Xacct Technologies to add application layer capabilities to their platforms. These companies are part of P-Cube’s ecosystem partners along with Openet Telecom, Intec and DigitalRoute. For back office integration, P-Cube also works with Tazz Networks, Liberate, Core Networks and others. The company also has reseller agreements with Alcatel and Ericcson.

Encharge can be used to develop content-based prepaid and post-paid services in part by applying service access restrictions directly to the IP data stream.

“The P-Cube vision doesn’t stop at ABC,” Shahar said. “The platform can be leveraged to do a lot more. In the future we might develop applications around security, digital rights management and intrusion detection.”