Benu Networks
Innovation at the Network’s Edge

For Dino Di Palma, the CEO of Benu Networks, his formative years in Montreal fostering his passion for ice hockey, anchored in him the belief to go the extra mile to win every time. At Benu, his team of telecommunication and networking technology experts exemplifies this spirit when designing innovative real-time subscriber management solutions for the network carrier community, facilitating smarter revenue generation models.

With wireless networking gaining prominence, the advancements in Wi-Fi is presenting service providers with new opportunities to offer value-added services that enhance the user experience. “Even though carriers gain entry into homes and businesses, they don’t have visibility to the end devices or the user to foster a relationship with the customer,” remarks Di Palma. Benu’s Virtual Service Edge provides an evolutionary mobile gateway platform that leverages Wi-Fi and mobile networks to bring intelligence and logic to the operator edge of the IP network. This enables the operators to tailor services and solutions in a time effective manner.

In the competitive carrier landscape, operators are on the lookout for scalable solutions to compete with over-the-top content companies. To manage the plethora of Wi-Fi devices smartly from the cloud, Benu’s next generation solutions leverage SDN and NFV, allowing network operators to address scalability challenges. Benu’s Mobile Edge Gateway (MEG) platform, MEG-400, is a high performance Wi- Fi Access Gateway (WAG) designed for high range carrier grade Wi-Fi to residential, business, and outdoor services. Meanwhile, the company’s new platform, MEG-50, addresses the mid- and lower-end capacity deployments of WAG.“Both the platforms offer services such as lighting up a second Service Set Identifier, and Wi-Fi offloading.The same architecture can be leveraged for Virtual Customer Premise Equipment solutions as well,” affirms Di Palma. Toward making smart homes smarter, Benu’s VSE platform for residential applications transfers the business logic of the customer premise equipments to the datacenter.

This virtualized computing environment gives carriers visibility to devices in a home or business.

Envisioning this concept to the IoT space, every device in a home could be connected and controlled from a smart device. “By assimilating the information directly from the device and using analytics, customer preferences and trends can be ascertained to tailor additional revenue generating business initiatives,” says Di Palma. For instance, a large cable operator had a challenge in managing its customers’ internal networks. To gain insights into the devices connected in a home, Benu leveraged Layer 2 technology and tunneling protocol to bring the metrics out of the carrier network and into the data center, thereby opening the window to the homes for carriers.

By assimilating the information directly from the device and using analytics, customer preferences and trends can be ascertained

On a futuristic perspective, Di Palma is contemplating solutions which can tackle BYOD security issues. “Utilizing Benu's architecture, enterprises can deploy a solution which directs an employee entering the organization to use a specific application in the office for the day’s work. Instead of controlling the devices, it is the applications which need to be controlled,” says Di Palma.

Innovation is the sole focus for Benu’s experienced team of telecommunications veterans. The firm’s turn around time for added features is comparatively lower in comparison to the bigger players in this space. “Ease of use is critical for any service to be successful. By collaboratively working with carriers, we are enabling the carrier community to embrace the change toward managing smart homes and businesses,” concludes Di Palma.