Parks Associates Blog

Friday, December 19, 2008

Finally, some public news about Prodea Systems

We've been making trips up the Dallas North Tollway to visit the folks at Prodea Systems for more than two years. We've been waiting for the company to come out from under the radar, because up until now, they are most well-known for having been founded by Anousheh, Hamid and Amir Ansari, the founders of Telecom Technologies, which was sold to Sonus Networks. Anousheh was a "space tourist" on the International Space Station in late 2006.

Prodea looks to make a splash at CES with a "digital lifestyle command center." Although the piece of customer premise equipment looks suspiciously like another VUDU box, what Prodea has done is to supply an end-to-end solution for the service provider community to deploy a range of services. Prodea notes that likely applications will revolve around home network management, aggregation and backup of personal and internet media, remote access to all networked devices in the home, delivery of interactive entertainment such as VoD and digital broadband radio, carrier-grade VoIP, home monitoring, energy management, e-Health services and additional easy-to-use applications to be provided in the future.

It's an interesting strategy, and one that might certainly fit with a "better/best" approach that I'm hearing as a desire from the telecom industry in particular. Yes, telecom operators are deploying FTTx networks and advanced triple-play and IPTV services using the standard systems integrators, back-end solutions, and CPE partners. However, where I see Prodea finding a position is in helping perhaps smaller carriers with a turnkey solution that can provide very well managed core services (voice, video, data), but then also add the value-added features that we know carriers will need to create sticky services, keep customers happy (and retained), and drive new revenue streams.

Prodea says that they have five service provider partners that they'll announce soon. I'll look forward to hearing more.

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2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

What exactly did they announce that they have not already done in their mktg materials for over 2 years. Have you seen the product - assuming you are at CES - would be nice to hear your commentary after visiting them in their booth.

12:12 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thanks for your comment. I haven't had the chance to see the demonstration in action, so I'm hoping that I'll get an invite up to Plano soon. I think the big difference in the public announcements from Prodea versus the marketing material has been the complete end-to-end solution that they put together. The early days of development were looking at all kinds of things. Would it be a "digital home remote support box" like Sereniti? Would it be a set-top box and service kind of like Sezmi? The final solution appears to be much more complete in my mind.

11:44 AM  

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