Venation offers network booster

• Article 10 of 25
• Infoconomist, December 2001
• View the original article online

Despite recent technical advances, many networks are still unable to scale sufficiently to carry large-scale news, video or interactive content broadcasts. Latency acts as a barrier to the deployment of new interactive services, while congestion causes problems for business-critical applications on the internet and across intranets.

Ipswich, UK-based Venation believes the problem lies with the way that conventional Internet applications are built. These applications, they say, use an inefficient means of transferring data, so that developers cannot take advantage of all the improvements in network technology without having to rewrite those applications.

The idea of Venation founders Ralph Cochrane and Paul Evans – two former research team heads at telecoms giant BT – is to take the various advances in networking hardware and software and supply a single gateway package.

This package includes features such as multicasting, the IPSec security standard, network quality of service (QoS) and edge-server caching. These are combined in a system accessible through a single software interface.

This means that, instead of writing applications that access networks directly, developers can write their applications to access Venation's network services. As the technology improves or the network expands, the applications automatically benefit. The company also offers adaptors for existing applications.

Venation is one of the first spin-offs from British Telecom's Brightstar incubator. BT has granted the company certain intellectual property and patents, while Softbank UK has invested £7 million (€11.4m) in first-round venture funding. (Both BT and Softbank enjoy 37.5% stakes in Venation.)

The company has also partnered with BT Ignite (BT's computer services division) and systems giant Hewlett-Packard, who both use Venation's product as part of their respective network service offerings. At the moment, it is targetting media organisations and financial institutes as the main markets for its product.

However, it has not yet been able to convince many companies that its products are what they need to accelerate their networks – or even that their networks need accelerating in the first place. Furthermore, with most companies' network improvements tending to be implemented in a piecemeal fashion, Venation faces competition from companies in all sectors of network performance improvement.

Nevertheless, it has an innovative approach that could easily find a niche in bandwidth-hungry companies.