TELECOMS: Hoping to hit a sweet spot in the communications industry, Intune Networks has launched a product to help networks to cope better
IF INTUNE NETWORKS hits its targets, the company could triple its workforce in two years and go all the way to an initial public offering in four, according to chief executive Tim Fritzley. A major milestone on this ambitious road map took place in Dublin this week when the company launched its Verisma product line at the TM Forum conference, bringing Intune’s technology to the marketplace after 10 years of research and development.
Scooping The Irish TimesInnovation of the Year 2011 award, Intune has been identified as a rising star for pioneering technology that enables network carriers to combat capacity issues and cope with growing volumes of data traffic.
The company employed another 10 people this year taking the total to 153, bucking economic trends because it hits a sweet spot in the communications industry. Intune solves problems that arise from the relentless growth of network traffic, on the consumer side with the explosion in web-based video services and in business with the rise of cloud computing.
“In their wildest dreams, carriers didn’t envisage what the cloud and web services would become,” said Fritzley. “All of a sudden, network predictability has gone out the window and they are struggling with network and traffic planning.”
At the core of the Verisma products is optical packet switch and transport technology, facilitating what the industry calls “liquid bandwidth” with a virtual network infrastructure that avoids bottlenecks by making data traffic management more dynamic.
Since 1999, when founders John Dunne and Tom Farrell started to develop the technology in a lab at University College Dublin, demands on network capacity have grown dramatically, fuelled by the rise of streaming video and the emergence of smartphones and tablets that soak up rich media content over mobile as well as fixed networks.
Even since Fritzley joined as chief executive in 2006, the emergence of cloud computing has made its technology even more relevant for service providers. Brought in to give the company some commercial muscle, the former vice president of Microsoft TV is an American who knows how to play up the value as well as the technical benefits of Intune’s technology.
His effortless sales patter touches every pain point that network carriers suffer. “On the initial purchase cost, we are 30 to 60 per cent cheaper than alternatives, and, year-on-year, we’re close to 60 to 80 per cent cheaper on operational costs. And we are an augmentation to existing networks because nobody wants to go in and rip out billions of dollars of equipment,” he says.
Verisma promises new levels of network efficiency and customers are already in the bag, according to Fritzley, but can’t be named because of non-disclosure agreements. Intune has been working with Telefonica’s research and development division, which suggests that O2’s parent company is a likely candidate, but Fritzley is saying nothing. He would only confirm that Europe is as much a focus as the US.
“There are some pretty sophisticated video providers among the carriers in Europe. France is the single largest IPTV market in the world in terms of active subscribers,” he says.
Intune has another product close to market, the fruits of a partnership with Openet and Amartus. The three Irish companies have worked together on the Catalyst Project, a way for service providers to build a charging model around their networks. A hot topic in cloud computing, it applies the principles of pay-as-you-go service delivery to bandwidth.
Project Catalyst was developed on the Government’s €10 million Exemplar Network, the test-bed environment built with Intune technology as a way of ensuring that the company’s know-how would have a footprint in Ireland.
“I was pretty cynical when they first approached me because I have never seen a government be agile or nimble. But it has been quite a magnet for inward investment from multinationals,” says Fritzley. He says Exemplar can play a part in establishing an ecosystem of telco innovation in Ireland.
Fritzley hints that the government investment played a part in persuading the company to stay here. Despite being home-grown, Intune’s future in Ireland was not always assured. “It was hard to drop a project like this in Ireland because it doesn’t have a culture of telecom development,” he says.
When he joined he was concerned about the lack of local expertise needed to bring the technology to market. “Ireland has great engineers when it comes to manufacturing and embedded systems, and a great software community, but there is not a company here, multinational or indigenous, that has developed a complex telecom platform like we have. I had to hire and train because there was a lack of availability of people who had done this before.”
Neither was he expecting Intune to do much business in Ireland. “Advanced telco services had been slow here. Eircom has struggled to get their debt structure cleaned up and it has been more difficult for them than other carriers over the years.”
Despite the economic difficulties, he’s confident Intune is in the right place. “There is a variety of things that make it attractive to stay, not only in Ireland but in Europe in general,” he says. “The EU has recognised that if they want to stay at the forefront of what is going on in the world they are going to have to make some investments and big bets. We are seeing a lot of projects that re-establish Europe as a hotbed of telecom technology.”
