Narad, IBM join forces to chase commercial cable business

Narad Networks and IBM are allying to chase the nascent broadband cable commercial business market, by delivering an xSP service platform primarily for IT services that includes a joint hosting and delivery platform enabling IT services to be delivered at speeds of up to 100 Mb/s over existing cable lines.

While IBM has “a very large number of partnerships,” the agreement with Narad “has a lot of dedicated resources associated with it” and has go-to-market plans “that have a lot more weight behind them than your run-of-the-mill partnership,” said Peter Goucher, director of device-led solutions for the IBM Pervasive Computing Group.

IBM’s back-office support includes PowerPC chips in devices that are used in the offering, device and server systems management software and IBM servers and storage management, Goucher said. Narad brings a network management system that helps operators squeeze more data and speeds into their hybrid fiber/coax [HFC] networks.

”Cable operators will offer the core services, the high-speed access at fractions of 100 megabits symmetrical and VPNs and video conferencing and IBM Global Services offers premium IP-outsourced services,” said Chuck Kaplan, Narad’s marketing vice president, comparing the arrangement to cable’s video model of basic and premium packages.

“Some of the cable operators we’re talking to are saying, ‘IBM, you do the whole thing,’ and some of them are saying, ‘We’ll do part of it, and you do part of it,’” Kaplan said. “All of these models are great.”

Kaplan, who said the offering is “up at one very big site,” declined to name customers or locations. “We can’t announce it,” he said.

Both companies see cable’s commercial business – especially as it targets small/medium business opportunities -- as a gold mine.

“There’s more than $100 billion a year spent on services in the SMB space and largely in the small/medium businesses doing IT services all by themselves with in-house resources that are clearly not what they would consider world class,” Kaplan said.

Thus, they can use what Narad and IBM bring. “IBM is making a major push into this space,” said Goucher, equating the current market to the digital divide with a gap between enterprise and SMB customers.

“We’re trying to bridge that gap by taking a lot of things that we deliver to large enterprises and packaging them in ways that we can get them to market affordably to these small/medium businesses,” he said.