Ellacoya Unveils Its First Product

Startup Ellacoya Networks (www.ellacoya.com) today introduces its first product, the SGS 44000. The new service generation system sits at the service edge of the network to provide a way for service providers to keep tabs on the services individual subscribers are using, when they're using them, and the type of information they're getting.

The platform, slated for availability this summer, is designed for IP services running over DSL, cable modem, wireless and Ethernet networks.

With all the new sellers of transport private-labeling services such as DSL, long-distance and other products, the importance of branding is becoming diluted and service providers are seeing the need to offer more value-based services, says Cathy Gadecki, vice president of strategy and solutions at Ellacoya.

"You need a way of understanding individual subscribers and getting applications to them, so you need to know what subscribers are on network, what they're doing, and how you should serve them," she says.

For example, a service provider sees a subscriber going to Yahoo and instead could direct them to a corporate portal that the service provider has developed with Yahoo, Gadecki says. Or the service provider could cache popular web sites and direct subscribers to those mirrored sites for better response times, she says.

Service providers also have to be able to create services rapidly and as needed, she says. For example, a service provider should be able to turn up a market trial of unified messaging in a given city without entering command line interfaces to all network devices.

The Service Creation Manager associated with the SGS 44000 is an LDAP directory that enables service providers to quickly assign services to large or select groups of users.

"Say you want to switch out a voice over IP gateway," she says. "Today you'd have to manually change router destinations with all routers. But with SCM all routers would be updated, so configuration is much quicker."

She added that a company also could group users by zip code, as well as targeting an area with less bandwidth in order to lower the subscribers' maximum amount.

"Or if you're working in a university campus that wants to block Napster traffic, you could do that," she says.

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