We’ve been waiting for something like Network Magic to come along. At the simplest, think of Network Magic as an SMNP MIB for the home network, with a pretty and intuitive front end “console.”
We’ve just returned from the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Like most years, we’ve got sore feet and wide eyeballs and we’re spending a little extra time looking at our accounts in Quicken to see how we can figure out the budget for that 6-foot plasma.
But we’ve also come back impressed by the continuing emphasis on home networking from consumer electronics (CE) companies, traditional networking vendors, and … for the first time at CES … telcos. On display were advances in the physical layer – with new powerline and phoneline options as well as MIMO wireless systems all promising HDTV-capable speeds without requiring Cat 5. The hardware itself is advancing as well – with home networking functionality being incorporated in more and more devices, ranging from set top boxes to media adapters to gaming systems.
But perhaps the most significant home networking advance we saw had nothing to do with moving the bits around the house but instead had everything to do with the management and monitoring of the devices that tie together a home network.
This is significant because – let’s face it – home networking is still too hard for many people. Network World didn’t launch Network Life because it was easy for grandma to “go wireless” – they launched it because we all know how hard it is to be the family and neighborhood guru on PCs and networking. Microsoft, Linksys, D-Link, Netgear and the rest have all made networking far easier than it used to be. None, however, have made it truly foolproof and “grandma-ready.”
To the rescue comes a start-up of ex-Microsofters, Pure Networks, which launched their new Network Magic software system at the show. If Pure Networks can continue to focus on maintenance and performance issues, and not get sucked away by the silliness of file access that everyone else is focusing on, we think that they can have a big impact on the home network environment.
See, we’ve been waiting for something like Network Magic to come along. At the simplest, think of Network Magic as an SMNP MIB for the home network, with a pretty and intuitive front end “console.”
Network Magic’s client software is easily installed on PCs (and, if things go to plan, will be included on routers, gateways and access points) and provides a simple to understand view into the home network that makes it easy for users without a networking background to configure (or let the network auto-configure) multiple PCs, access points, networked printers, networked storage, media adapters and the like. The software is in beta, and definitely needs work, but the concept and promise is exciting.
So a great advance for end-users, but what’s in it for the service provider? Well it’s really about two things: cutting costs and enabling services. The cost cutting side is probably pretty self-evident: a solution like Network Magic can keep customers off the phone with tech support. Given the low margins telcos make on home networking services today – where the model is often to give the customer a home gateway at or near cost, with little or no ongoing revenue – it only takes a couple of tech support calls to kill the business case. (One home router vendor at the show told us that on their direct-to-customer sales it takes only about 4 support calls from a customer to cancel out all revenue for a router sale.)
But moving forward, we think systems like Network Magic give telcos a way to make more money from their broadband customers. The visibility this system provides into the network – and the ability of the system to automatically configure and connect new networked devices – gives the telco the ability to confidently provision new services deeper into the home. Imagine this kind of software resident on a residential gateway or set top box, allowing customers to easily add new end points onto the network – endpoints that might be revenue-generating for the telco (perhaps a network adapter for Xbox Live service, for example).
The next step for Network Magic – or for competitors trying to get into this space – is to move beyond the configuration and maintenance capabilities of the current iteration of this software, and into a more proactive QoS monitoring level of functionality. As providers start to offer VoIP, video, conferencing, gaming and more on one connection, the ability to monitor the performance of not just the broadband connection, but also of the home network itself will give telcos a means of providing a new level of customer service for a new generation of value-adds. And in the end, that’s how a telco can beat the competition.
