Advanced Television

SES: “At forefront of new wave of connectivity”

September 13, 2019

Colin Mann @ IBC

Executives at satellite operator SES consider the company well-placed to respond to the changing needs of its customers. Steve Collar, CEO, speaking at a press briefing at IBC 2019 in Amsterdam, said that the operator had the superpower of reach and economics, suggesting that its recent agreement with Microsoft to develop a range of cloud-based services gave it a cloud-scale satellite network, and that leveraging the kind of technologies available in the Cloud was “vital”.

The SES deal with Amdocs to develop an open network automation platform (ONAP)-based orchestration for the delivery of satellite-enabled network services would enable it to serve customers in aircraft, ships at sea, cruise ships, governments and fixes data networks in the most flexible way possible. “It’s really, really super exciting,” he enthused, adding that SES’s vision for the future was that of a “massively-flexible, massively well-connected network that our customers can roam on to and roam of in every single vertical that we serve and we’re closer to that reality than we ever have been.”

Collar confirmed that “every single satellite” that SES launched from now on would be brought into that network, with customers being routed by “any metric you choose, whether that be latency, whether that be performance, whether that be availability, whether that be cost,” suggesting that these were the same services and capabilities that existed in terrestrial networks, but were now able to be done by satellite. “We can now leverage this really exciting superpower of rich connectivity, connecting people at the edge of the network driving cloud to the edge of the network.”

“This is really exciting stuff; it has never been done before,” he declared. “I think we are at the forefront of a new wave of connectivity, a new wave of truly taking satellite mainstream and integrating satellite into the network of tomorrow.”

Ferdinand Kayser, CEO, SES Video, said the company was responding to the needs of its customers, citing the Microsoft-SES partnership that initially would see Cloud Playout Services, with more to come in the future. Becoming more and more cloud-based gave customers the benefits of flexibility, scalability as well as being cost-effective.

 

 

 

 

 

Categories: Articles, Broadband, Broadcast, DTH/Satellite, Satellite, Services