“It’s not all about building bigger, better, faster network pumps”

Interview with Jim Wilkinson, SVP Sales for Edgeware

Jim has operated in the TV on-demand business for the past 12 years and has been involved with many significant projects throughout the industry. Prior to joining Edgeware, he occupied positions at nCUBE as VP Sales EMEA and as UK Managing Director for AT&T EasyLink, and has also held board positions in two other high profile companies in the computing sector.

ipTV News: What do you believe is different about Edgeware’s approach to the on-demand segment?

JW: Edgeware is a relatively young company, however our people are very experienced in on-demand video, and that has enabled us to take a completely fresh look at headend and central office streaming technology.

As a technology provider the requirements to support entertainment on-demand are going through an evolving set of needs, and those needs are certain to grow to meet future service deliverables to allow network operators to compete in the market.

The industry is growing rapidly, what do you perceive to be the main developments going forward?

The key changes impacting us are an escalating need for scalability, primarily driven by the migration of broadcast technology to on demand content and to an increasing use of high-definition content based services.
The end result is that the data volumes that need to be pumped will increase exponentially over the next few years. And the challenge for a technology provider in the streaming business is how to address these needs.

It’s not all about building bigger, better, faster network pumps, but being able to deploy video servers easily and effectively in the operator’s networks. In this evolving world the networks will not cope with centralised server architectures and what is required is that servers become distributable resources and become more like switches and routers and less like computers.

What are the main commercial advantages of Edgeware’s solutions?

At Edgeware we’ve taken a design approach that emanates from router design and means the server is entirely solid state and implements most of the “heavy lifting” aspects of video pumping directly into hardware. What this means in tangible benefits is that we have a device that can demonstrate a four-fold price advantage, a thirty-fold rack space advantage and a fifty-fold power consumption advantage, significantly easing deployment into an operator’s network by collapsing many other functions needed to support a video server such as firewalling, session management and ingest processing into the video server.

In the short 12 months we have been shipping equipment we appear to have captured a lot of market traction, and are frequently being described as a disruptive technology in the industry.  We have live systems operating with Tier 1 telcos and large cable MSOs, and have integrated our system into the main back-office systems in our market domain.

For Edgeware we feel that the future looks bright and we’re well positioned to move our industry into its next phase of growth.