Does a butterfly scream?

Net.com entered its cocoon 18 months ago as an enterprise ATM company and will emerge this week at Supercomm as a next-generation service creation provider for telcos. The change was dramatic. So, too, will be the company's marketing campaign as it screams for attention and the chance to spread its wings.

The company is using the venue to launch its Scream Service Creation Manager platforms, the Scream 100 and Scream 50 (see profile on page 172).

Based on technology alone, analysts say the company has what it takes to succeed in its new space. However, Net.com faces an uphill battle on the economic front and the competitive front — a battle that can be won, say analysts.

President and CEO Bert Whyte, who set the company's new direction two years ago, remains undaunted in the face of the new economy.

“People are thinking about how to build a model or create an environment in which [customers] will ask for more and more services off the network, and they are asking, ‘What are the platforms that will allow that?’ In many respects we are in an environment in which the opportunity has broadened for us rather than lessened,” Whyte said.

The opportunity Net.com hopes to seize is one offered by service providers that need to start cashing in on their next-generation network investments.

“Carriers know how to make money out of voice. They've done it for a hundred years. It still brings the lion's share of revenue, but they have no idea how to make money out of broadband,” Whyte said.

To help service providers — and Net.com — make money out of broadband, the Scream service creation platforms use an open architecture that, according to a favorable report by Ron Westfall, analyst for Current Analysis, “brings closer to reality the ability of carriers to transition from delivery of basic IP services to the delivery of value-added IP services with SLA-backed bandwidth guarantees in an automated fashion.”

It also puts the power of service creation back in the hands of the carriers, said Craig Forbes, vice president of marketing at Net.com. “The openness and ability to program and change how the platform operates allows carriers to distance themselves from the vendor and be creative in how they deploy and deliver new services,” Forbes said.

To distance itself from the competition, Net.com developed, among other features such as true central office readiness, a split plane architecture that physically separates the network control plane from the network data plane (see figure).

In his report, Westfall compares Scream's architecture to the public network/SS7 model. He also said with its ability to support 256,000 subscribers, 40 Gb/s switching capacity and OC-48 line rate processing, the Scream 100 platform “allows Net.com to establish clear product differentiation against rival IP service platforms.”

These benchmarks will help the company compete against established IP services players such as Nortel Networks, CoSine Communications and Lucent Technologies, Westfall said. However, as Net.com looks to help service providers migrate to “third-generation” IP service creation architectures, the company also will be looking at some new competition from start-ups such as Celox Networks, Ellacoya Networks and Quarry Technologies.

One of the advantages Net.com may have over newer competitors is experience. “They have a worldwide presence and have been supporting companies internationally for years,” said Christin Flynn, analyst at The Yankee Group.

“Their issue has been that they had an enterprise focus for a while, and it took them a while to evolve their products,” Flynn said. “But I think they have made a big jump with the Scream product line.”

Still, Westfall said, Net.com's open services creation model heads into uncharted territory, and the company has yet not proved it can address service creation requirements of broadband providers.