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As more video gets streamed across the Internet, Acton company Blackwave Inc. has seen a strong interest in its technology to speed up that video — primarily in Asia. To help tap into that interest, the company has just rolled out the latest version of its technology, which it says can boost video delivery performance by up to five times over other systems.
Surprisingly, Blackwave gets this performance boost from servers built using off-the-shelf components. The hard drives, the motherboards, the disc controllers and the switches combining them are all the same technologies that anyone could buy from suppliers anywhere. What Blackwave does is reconfigure almost every component so that they work together exactly the way the company wants them to, and that enables them to deliver 10 gigabit per second video over the Internet, according to chief technology officer Michael Kilian.
Blackwave’s customers include subscription-based video content aggregators as well as content delivery networks, or CDNs. “We do have CDNs who want to use us to build their CDNs out,” Kilian said.
The new technology Blackwave just rolled out is called Blackwave Chorus, an integrated platform that supports wide variety of popular video delivery protocols in a single unit. Perhaps most timely is Chorus’ complete support for Adobe Flash, in light of Apple Inc.’s recent announcement about the new iPad which will not support Flash.
Terri McClure, a senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group, based in Milford, said that the main benefit of Chorus is that it can marshal system resources so that large-scale users can provide tens of thousands of simultaneous video streams from a single rack.
The typical configuration for a single rack-mountable system from Blackwave is 24 terabytes of video storage and 10 gigabits per second of connection speed. It is scalable to whatever limit the customer needs, and Kilian said Blackwave would simply connect systems together through its own 10 Gbps Ethernet switches.
Last week, 36-employee Blackwave opened headquarters offices in Tokyo and Seoul to handle the spike in growth it has seen in Asia. As its first “major customer,” the company has signed digital content distribution provider SkillUp Japan Corp. Blackwave has also penned reseller agreements in Japan with IT Frontier Corp., a Mitsubishi company that specializes in information technology solutions, and n2 Technology Corp., a reseller of video delivery equipment. In addition, Blackwave signed a nationwide customer service and support agreement with Toshiba IT-Services Corp.
Venture backers have taken to Blackwave’s value proposition. In September the company closed on $7 million in Series C funding from existing investors Globespan Capital Partners, Flybridge Capital Partners and Sigma Partners. In total, since it was founded in 2006, Blackwave has brought in a reasonably small $29 million for a hardware and networking company.
As a private company, Blackwave doesn’t give out financial details. The company is not profitable yet, Kilian said, mostly because it has just started shipping its products on a large scale. “Our goal is to be profitable in the next couple of years,” he said. “We are still building out the business, still building out the partnerships.”
Blackwave recently announced as a new customer Shinsegae, Korea’s largest retailer — the firm bought all the Wal-Mart stores in Korea — which is building out its own CDN. While growth in Asia is blossoming for Blackwave, the obvious question is about the biggest CDN in the world, Cambridge’s Akamai Technologies Inc. Kilian says it is the “technologies” part of Akamai that has been a barrier for them so far.
“Akamai has proprietary software, and for us to integrate them, we would have to adopt their OS,” he said. “I think going forward we’ll revisit that. There’s some work we are doing that I think is going to be very interesting for them.”
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