Minerva reports that it added 45 new U.S. small telco customers in the past 12 months, which increased its customer base by more than 80 percent. 20 of these customers switched from other middleware systems.
Minerva has emerged as a very important supplier of middleware software to the small U.S. telcos. Minerva picked up the slack as Myrio turned its attention to larger global opportunities after its acquisition by Siemens. Kasenna also supplies middleware software to this market.
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Is the majority of the Minerva deals are direct or via partnerships (system integrators)? perhaps Minerva has become a valuable partner for other players in the IPTV business.
do they have a preferred vendor for VOD or encoders they work closely with?
looks like every IPTV deal can be worth up to 1.5-2$ mil including head-end, middleware VOD and DRM.
Makes you wonder why the big guys aren't active in this segment via rsellers and local system integrators...
The IPTV alliances that address the small U.S. telcos are pretty loose. There are few exclusive relationships. Last year Tut Systems (now part of Motorola) told me that they were recommending Minerva, Siemens/Myrio, and Kasenna middleweare and leaving the choice up to the customer.
I have not identifiend a consistent VOD partner for Minerva. Minerva does insist on Latens for content protection/DRM.
I think the typical U.S. small telco deal is closer to $1 million. This is a very price competitive markete. Tut Systems (now part of Motorola), Skystream (now part of Tandbaerg), and Optibase have been active on the video system side.
Do you think Skystream and TUTS would still be active in this market as part of MOT and ERIC?
If not,that leaves the market to a very small number of head-end vendors. OBAS is the only one that come to (my) mind
I believe that Tandberg (Skystream) is still quite active in this market. I expect that Motorola (Tut) will also remain active. I am not sure what else Motorola bought with Tut other than access to this market.
These acquisitions may releive some of the price pressure in this market. Motorola and Tandberg are not as likely to compete quite as hard for business.
Optibase is is the only other company that I have seen competing seriously for the U.S. small telco market.
I think MOT bought TUTS for other reasons. They don't seem eager to penetrate the IPTV market. my bet is that they bought TUTS not for the encoding technology and that they will buy TERN not becasue of their edge-decoder but for other applications.
One such application might be DPI and ad-insertion that both companies have (or at least claim to have). The funniest thing is that MOT resells TERN's dm6400 splicer for ad insertion to AT&T while they should have splicing capabilities as part of TUTS' Astria.
Another business they might be going after with TUTS is the edge modulation for VZ (currently dominated by BBND)
Frankly, I think that Tut's business was to provide video encoders to the small U.S. Telcos. I don't think that they did much else. Their premise based VDSL products were pretty much dead.
Don't forget that Motorola bought a huge share of the U.S. small telco access market when it acquired Next Level. Next Level really made this market happen five years ago. I think that Motorola would like to reestablish itself in this market now that it has stopped marketing the Next Level products.
I think that if MOT really wanted to get into the head-end business, it would do it via an acquisition that is more tier-1 oriented. TUTS management has been promising tier-1 wins claiming it is involved in several large projects in the US. I don't know what was the nature of those projects nor do I have any info about how they are doing with those opportunities.
They paid peanuts for what is considered to be the most profesiional telco-oriented system, so perhaps they are planning on combinig that with their huge footprint and marketing abilities.
If I were them I would have bought either HLIT or TAT. combined with TERN, that could have position them as a monster in all 3 verticle markets while TUTS is a pure IPTV thing.
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