Friday, November 14, 2008

Sagamore aims to speed up broadband’s last mile

By Efrain Viscarolasaga

After working for four years on its platform, Westford-based Sagamore Systems Inc. has launched its first product, called the XConnext Zero-Touch, a way for broadband carriers to remotely provision and manage triple-play services in the last mile.

The product is a software platform that provides carriers with the ability to deploy and manage new services across a copper infrastructure, rather than having to physically send trucks and technicians to the neighborhood nodes.

While bringing fiber to every customer location — a la Verizon Communications Inc.’s FiOS rollout — makes such provisioning possible without a product such as Sagamore’s, most carriers, particularly Tier 2 operators in more rural areas, are hesitant (or unable) to make the investment in such a significant upgrade.

“In most next-gen networks, most carriers are driving fiber deeper into the network, but still using copper to provide services to the end users,” said Eric Hedlund, a co-founder and vice president of marketing for Sagamore Systems. “You can do 100 megabit connections and multiple HD services over copper, so why not leverage that infrastructure?”

The 20-person company was founded by Hedlund, a former executive at California’s Turnstone Systems Inc., along with his co-founder Darrell Furlong, a former engineering executive at VINA Technologies Inc. also of California. Sagamore is backed by Needham-based Prism VentureWorks, who ponied up $3.5 million in funding in 2006 and an undisclosed follow-on round last April. As part of the funding, Prism general partner Bill Seifert, a Wellfleet Communications veteran and founder and CEO of Agile Networks Inc. (sold to Lucent Technologies Inc. in 1996) was appointed to the Sagamore board of directors.

Hedlund reports Sagamore has a “couple of trials” ongoing with North American service providers, and hopes to expand those in 2009, but declined to provide details.