Middleware maneuvering

Consolidation in any industry typically is associated with maturity and stability. Yet in the case of IPTV middleware, while IP-enabled services may be maturing, things are still murky in the middle. The past year has been marked by acquisitions and a reshuffling of the competitive rankings, and the commonly held belief that the market would winnow to a dominant few has given way to the notion that the battle is still far from over.

“The future of IPTV rests on middleware,” said Vince Vittore, analyst with Yankee Group. “It's not the TV that's the important part here; it's the IP. And within the IP, it's the middleware layer. … It's such a key element within this overall ecosystem; it's really the heart and the glue that holds everything together in the IPTV environment. You can't ignore it. And if you can't ignore it, you might as well participate in it.”

In this critical time for middleware the big players keep getting bigger — either through acquisition or internal growth — the middle-tier vendors are closing the gap between middleware and content security, and the remaining small players are struggling to latch on to anyone the leaders haven't already snatched up. While Alcatel-Lucent and Thompson continue to dominate the upper echelon of global end-to-end IPTV solutions, Ericsson is one company vying for the top seed by paving a middleware path of its own.

In September, the IPTV provider launched its IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) middleware with the help of a 2007 acquisition, Tandberg TV. The open-source platform is made from scratch, not a rehash of anything Tandberg had done in the past, said Alan Delany, IPTV business development director for Tandberg TV. While some were surprised Ericsson didn't outsource its middleware to a third party, he pointed out that Ericsson could leverage other parts of its business in a way a component player never could.

“At Ericsson we have 29,000 people in services worldwide,” Delany said. “We have a very strong systems integration arm. Some of the small middleware providers don't have the ability to do that level of support and integration. They'll have one or two wins here or there that they can bang their drums on, but apart from that, there are not that many middleware operators who can stand on their own two legs.”

No one knows this better than Myrio. After being acquired by Nokia Siemens Networks in 2005, the middleware provider has rapidly drifted off the radar screen, failing to get new business and causing many of its existing customers to take their money elsewhere. Some analysts suggest that as a fixed-line solution merged with a company focused largely on mobility, Myrio simply got lost in the shuffle, while others believe NSN may actually be looking to get Myrio off its hands by offering it up for acquisition to a company that doesn't yet have its own middleware.