[Satellite Today – 07-10-08] A new satellite solution will spearhead a new push into Europe for Newpoint Technologies, a market in which the company has “significantly underperformed” in throughout the last few years, according to the company’s top official.
    The Compass satellite management system, set for release in September, “is the most important product we have ever released,” said Wally Martland, president of Newpoint Technologies, a subsidiary of Integral Systems.    “With the exception of our original Compass product 12 years ago, the whole service-based management solution is by far the biggest research and development effort that we have undertaken. This is the biggest change to the classical network management products you see today. This will drastically change the way the network is managed.”
    The new Compass system will replace traditional equipment views of a network “where you are looking at diagrams and seeing which equipment components have failed within your network,” said Martland. “The service management aspect takes a different view of the network. Rather than managing the equipment, you are managing the services or the traffic that is being carried by the network. So when the equipment fails, you not only see that but you also see the services that have been lost as a result of that failure. This allows you to prioritize these services that have failed and recover the high priority services right up front, making it easy for the operator to make decisions about high and low priority traffic.”
    The solution already is being put through its paces with AT&T and Intelsat in the United States, and Martland believes Newpoint will be able to gain a significant number of deals for Compass in Europe. “I would hope to have at least 20 to 30 contracts in Europe for service management,” he said. “It is a big component that is missing in the marketplace right now.
    “The other aspect that comes into play is military networks. Similar to a broadcaster, they have the same issue in terms of mobile and transportable terminals, they want to see what traffic is being carried out to what terminals,” he said. “When there is a failure of the terminal, they want to know how they can get the high priority services restored quickly so they can facilitate communications out to the field.”

Back on the European Map
The solution could help put Newpoint back on the map in Europe, which has been “a slow market,” said Martland. “I think we have done about 10 percent of our sales there, so getting back into the European market is one of our driving goals for the next year. We want to start a lot more business in the European region,” he said.
    SES could be one of the first companies in Europe to sign up for the solution. Martland said, “SES is looking to go ahead and get a single management solution for all of their facilities and see the flow of services when they enter into their network, when they physically leave the network and see an end-to-end view as it is carried throughout the network. [This is] not only the ground segment but all the way up to the satellite, monitoring the carriers and the satellite itself,” he said.
    Newpoint also will be targeting major broadcasters and distributors. “These are the ones that have high priority services. They are carrying a lot of traffic and they really want to see what is affected rather than what equipment failed,” said Martland “… I think in the past, the timing has not been right because we have not had the product the European broadcasters really wanted, so we developed the whole service-based management. We originally saw this three to four years ago. Many of the RFPs (request for proposals) coming out of Europe from broadcasters were service based RFPs, whereas our products were very equipment orientated. So consequently we didn’t participate or win a lot of business in Europe. We have put a concerted effort into getting this service-based product management solution completed with one of the objectives that the product meets the requirements of broadcasters in Europe.”