Optenet, which began life as a family-friendly ISP in Northern Spain, now offers carrier class filtering to ISPs in North America.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [July 21, 2008]

Optenet was founded in 1997 in San Sebastian, Spain, as an ISP. The founder, Francisco Martin, was a professor who developed an in line filter and the ISP found a niche selling an internet service that was safe for minors.

"When the big guys started giving away internet service, and most ISPs failed, Telefonica [the ILEC] wanted to know why Optenet was still there," says Joel Silberman, vice president of North American business development for Optenet.

Telefonica licensed the technology, Silberman says, and persuaded Optenet to focus on its filtering and leave the ISP connections to the ILEC.

The company maintains its development offices in San Sebastian, and corporate headquarters in Madrid, but has opened a sales office in Aventura, Florida.

Partners
No service provider does everything by itself. Everyone uses partners. Silberman has recently joined the company, coming from Crossbeam Systems, which provides hardware to Optenet. Optenet works with numerous other technology partners including a few who will be familiar to every ISP: BlueCoat for content filtering lists, Kaspersky Labs for anti-virus lists, and Commtouch for anti-spam lists.

So what does Optenet do? "Our contextual filter is the differentiating intellectual property in the product," says Silberman. "It delivers scalability and flexbility and a positive end user experience. It delivers low false positives and negatives. We tout the positive impact the technology provides to end users when selling to an ISP."

The system is similar to a virtual server, but there's only one instance of the program running. In a virtualized system, each customer gets their own instance of the program. In theory, that means that if one person's instance has issues, they won't effect anyone else. Silberman says that running fewer instances of the software makes the system more efficient and that a centralized solution reduces hardware, space, and power requirements.

It's powerful: blocking spam, viruses, phishing attacks, and even banner ads. Can it replace banner ads? That's not currently a feature.

Another key feature: no hardware or software installed at the customer site. Optenet reports that the sales conversion rate is between 5 and 10 times higher than a service that requires customers to install software.

For ISPs, Silberman notes, it's important to work with a company that designed its software for ISPs first. Too many content filter programs are designed for enterprise customers first, with ISPs an afterthought.

Finally, the company touts a powerful and intuitive GUI (see image below).

The channel
Although Optenet is an established player in Europe and in Central and South America (75 million users worldwide; customers include ILECs like Telmex, Telefonica, Telecom Italia, and Monaco Telecom), it has only recently entered the North American market.

Silberman says that he hopes to reach smaller ISPs through a reseller channel. To that end, he says, he hopes to set up several key vendors in North America who will host the software here.

Pilot programs are underway, but the company has not yet officially announced any ISP customers here.

—End