OpenVault acquires Nimble This to bolster monitoring product line, customer base. Acquisition positions the company to better respond to Profile Management Application (PMA) and proactive network maintenance (PNM) opportunities in the cable industry.
OpenVault has acquired Nimble This in a bid to create a new company that harnesses OpenVault’s Profile Management Application (PMA) and Nimble This proactive network maintenance (PNM) solutions.
The acquisition positions OpenVault as a major player in broadband prescriptive optimization with automated PMA and PNM capabilities for HFC networks--while expanding OpenVault’s customer base, including adding multiple Tier 1 domestic and international customers.
When it completes the acquisition, OpenVault says it will provide best-in-class monitoring, diagnostics, maintenance, management, optimization, and other solutions to more than 80 cable operators worldwide.
As part of this acquisition, OpenVault named Nimble This founder Brady Volpe its Chief Product Officer.
Volpe, who founded Nimble This in 2013, comes to OpenVault with a wealth of telecom and cable industry experience. During his 30-plus year broadband career, he held positions with JDSU, Sunrise Telecom, C-COR and Filtronic Sigtek.
“Brady Volpe’s expertise in troubleshooting issues in RF and DOCSIS broadband networks has significantly helped the industry and cable operators deliver the superior subscriber QoE that consumers expect,” said Mark Trudeau, CEO and founder of OpenVault. “The combination of the Nimble This PNM product suite with PMA and OpenVault’s other proven market-leading solutions gives cable operators a powerful arsenal – the creation of up to 40% more usable bandwidth in most DOCSIS networks, vastly improved network resiliency and a sophisticated set of tools to help monetize the continued growth in subscriber data consumption and increased bandwidth requirements.”
Nimble This has a long track record in driving innovation and product improvement. Its PNM platform uses DOCSIS standards such as pre-equalization, full band capture, upstream spectrum analysis and other data analytics technologies, including machine learning to identify, geographically pinpoint and notify cable operators about inside and outside plant impairments. These elements complement OpenVault’s existing network performance, subscriber satisfaction and operational solutions for access networks and IP networks.
Bulking the product portfolio
NimbleThis is the second major acquisition by OpenVault has made in the past 18 months.
The company’s acquisition of Velocidata at the end of 2021 enhanced OpenVault’s intellectual property portfolio, particularly in two key areas: the ability to quickly capture, enrich, and process large amounts of telemetry data, as well as technology that underpins OpenVault’s productization of CableLabs’ Profile Management Application specification.
OpenVault’s Velocidata came on the tail end of investment from three existing customers – Service Electric Cablevision, Service Electric Cable TV & Communications, and Blue Ridge Communications. The investment was targeted to drive expansion via mergers and acquisitions, organic growth, and increased visibility – most notably, increased market activity in Europe and Latin America.
A holistic view
By acquiring Nimble This, OpenVault will be able to provide deeper customer and networking monitoring capabilities for its customers.
OpenVault will incorporate the full suite of Nimble These technologies and capabilities into its product lineup, including:
Upstream Spectrum Analyzer: This will provide visibility into upstream RF noise for cable operators, even in distributed access architectures (DAA) with R-PHY nodes.
Fullband Capture Analyzer (FBC): The FBC gives cable operators 24x7 visibility into every RF signal in every subscriber’s home.
Pre-equalization analysis: This is the basis of PNM, which gives operators visibility into hidden impairments such as group delay and micro-reflections, thus drastically reducing unnecessary truck rolls and CSR calls.
Clusters: Years of machine learning combined with expert RF knowledge creating correlations groups, also known as clusters, that identify modems having common upstream (pre-eq) and downstream (FBC) impairments, enabling cable operators to identify and squash outside plant impairments rapidly.
Mobile app: A user-friendly mobile app incorporates access to downstream and upstream spectral analysis, RxMER, cable modem installation, work orders, geo-coding of cable modems, cable modem look-up using the device’s built-in GPS and other mobile app features.
“The excellence in leadership that OpenVault and Mark Trudeau have brought to network management and insights for over a decade has made it possible for cable operators of all sizes to anticipate and accommodate the rapid growth in broadband consumption,” said Volpe. “Together, OpenVault and Nimble This can provide a holistic view of the cable operators network from an end-to-end perspective, RF to IP.”
OpenVault will showcase its expanded product lineup from July 30-August 2 at the NCTC Independent Show in Minneapolis.
