Applications

Allot Partners to Offer New Services

DPI's not just a technology; it's now a platform for value-added services.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [June 17, 2008]

Eden Prarie, Minn.-based Allot Communications announced three partners who will help the company offer more services on its Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) platform. The company is known for the services you think of when you hear the word DPI, services like traffic shaping and filtering.

But at NXTComm this week, it's announcing partnerships that will take Allot's DPI technology and incorporate it into the kinds of services that ISPs are counting on to increase ARPU in an age of stagnant subscriber growth.

Allot will be working with:

• NebuAd to deliver better behavioral targeted advertising. There has been some controversy over NebuAd's service, and Allot is not issuing an official new release about this partnership this week. Nevertheless, it's clear that DPI could improve the service.
• PeerApp for video and P2P services. Obviously, knowing which applications are running would make it easier to prioritize bandwidth for those that are time sensitive.
• Qosmos for better VoIP billing and delivery. For example, Allot generates MOS scores that let the service provider track call quality.

Using the ATCA standard
"We have a scalable, telco-class product," says Bill Mello, Allot's director of marketing. "It was the first open ATCA-based platform to incorporate deep packet inspection technology. When we introduced the product last year, we said that our vision was more than classic DPI. Our vision is to enable value-added services that can use our core DPI capability to improve the overall performance of the solution, a new concept for DPI. No other vendor had talked about DPI enabling a broad range of services."

Just as PeerApp, though enabling P2P services, does not track or claim responsibility for the use or misuse of that technology, so too, Allot is providing a technology that is very powerful and can be both used and misused.

The need for the technlogy, Mello says, is clear. Service providers need to know what's going on in their networks. "We have had lots of customers try our product and one of the first things we show them is what's going on in their network."

Allot is building a platform. Companies making software that delivers value-added services can build a blade that delivers their service and takes advantage of Allot's DPI capabilities. Mello notes that other DPI vendors are building partnerships, but not a platform. "They have their appliances and the appliances are cabled together," he says.

So could other vendors build a chassis and put an Allot blade into it? "Our ServiceProtector blade [which provides security services] will fit into any ATCA chassis (barring issues with form factor and power), but a chassis from another vendor will not integrate ServiceProtector with our DPI technology."

The future, Mello says, is more services. A lot hopes to deliver parental controls for residential customers and filtering for business customers. "From a vendor perspective, every vendor sticks to their own knitting," he says. "We don't have to become a video caching expert and PeerApp doesn't have to become a DPI expert. Even the largest telcos know that they can no longer develop all their own equipment."

Vendors are learning the same lesson.

— End