Nominum Expands its Portfolio Significantly

By Jamie Epstein

TMCnet Web Editor

 

Redwood City-based Nominum (News - Alert) is an integrated subscriber, network and security solutions provider for 140+ carriers globally. The company's name when translated into Latin actually means name and numbers and its Chief Scientist Paul Mockapetris is touted as inventing domain naming systems (DNS).

Working with most of world largest carriers including Comcast and Verizon (News - Alert), Nominum not only has smart internal employees that are the fathers of DNS but truly understands the business overall. Looking at some statistics, while large social media sites like Twitter (News - Alert) powers about 400 billion tweets per day and Facebook accounts for 2.7 billion likes each day, the DNS provider runs around 1.1 trillion queries.

Today, the company is launching what it is calling its 'IDEAL ecosystem' that encompasses network services, subscriber services, security and big data analytics that are enabling network operators to deliver a differentiated customer experience with greater cost efficiency and agility.

I recently had the chance to speak with Nominum's CEO Gary Messiana in regards to its new launches that includes the N2 platform that "allows us to get real-time visibility into the query stream. Our innovative ecosystem assists developers in quickly building applications that offer much greater functionality, require much less sophisticated network expertise, and dramatically lowers the total cost of ownership."

Historically, carriers have always been worried about coverage and access, as well as stability of the network and because of increasing trends like commodization and a much larger amount of pressure caused by the introduction of countless devices to the network, carriers need to figure out a way to become much more efficient while running their infrastructure and saving money doing it.

That's where Nominum comes in, as it offers a highly differentiated user experience. The N2 platform brings functionality to the next level, complete with its lists, filters, data aggregation and policy management.

The robust platform also now includes the following applications:

Messiana added, "Virgin Media (News - Alert), a client of ours, recently deployed Wi-Fi underground in London for the Olympics. They came to use and said we have an opportunity to put Wi-Fi underground but we can't implement it unless we can block adult content. So we built content filtering into our platform and what happens now is we have a list management and filtering function and policy management function that says if someone is accessing the service underground, before giving access to the website the provider must check this preset list of known adult content sites."

By teaming with this business, although users will pay an upfront cost overall they will see a much lower total cost of ownership and gain access to a team of experts that can troubleshoot and detect a problem right away.

"It was always costly to use the DNS to build applications," Marcelo Baletti, head of Digital Services at Cablevision Argentina, commented in a statement. "Nominum showed us how to improve the subscriber experience while simultaneously growing our revenue with the N2 Platform, and we eliminated the high cost of long-term ownership."

Messian added, " Just make one phone call and we will located the issue and find a solution, in addition to delivering projects faster with a lot more functionality. "

 Nominum's architecture is a very modular approach meaning you can simply change out small pieces as you go over time and naturally migrate to the new platform ecosystem at whatever pace you want. The ability to tie the engine and application layer together is a very efficient way to deliver highly differentiated services more quickly and because you can mix and match and move, much greater agility.

When asked how these recently unveiled solutions affect the big data trend, he concluded, "If you look at even the cloud, I believe that long term you are going to see a lot more data in very unique and specific clouds which will ultimately give users easier access to information in a more user friendly format."