Turning on the computing spigot

As IT and communications converge, a number of different business models will develop. One that already is taking hold in Lafayette, La., involves a municipal fiber network, a wholesale services provider and a computing platform company offering a service dubbed “IT on demand.”

The service provider is Abacus Data Exchange, which is a wholesale provider buying bandwidth on the Lafayette Utilities System fiber network. The computing platform company is Liquid Computing, which offers a modular converged computing and communications resource that can be turned up or turned down as needed to provide what is essentially a very scalable data center environment with a very small footprint.

Liquid Computing combines the necessary processors, memory, networking and switching into a single system — driven by simple commands — to meet different application needs.

Using Liquid Computing's resources, Abacus can offer its customers dedicated servers in a virtual data center, enabling them to expand as needed to meet their growth, said Abigail Ransonet, chief visionary officer for Abacus and a former employee of LUS.

“I started looking at ways and solutions not to be a full facilities-based service provider but to be a smarter service provider,” she said. “We only offer broadband to customers who can use it to engage their customer in smarter application deployment. We wanted to utilize this convergence between computing and communication.”

Instead of building a massive data center, Abacus is working with a small footprint — but with the ability to grow as needed.

The model can work for almost any telecom application, said Greg McElheran, president and CEO of Liquid Computing. “Video-on-demand, IPTV, voice and video packages — they have an enormous streaming capacity,” he said. “You can collapse and converge a bunch of different functionalities onto a system like ours.”