By Claus Hetting, WiFi NOW CEO & Chairman
Cloud Wi-Fi management pioneer Plume is radically evolving its technology strategy to serve ISP clients better, says newly appointed Plume CEO Dan Herscovici and new CTO Chris Griffiths. Here’s a preview of Plume’s new and much more flexible hardware-agnostic and standards-based approach. Meanwhile, Plume this week released a Wi-Fi 7-capable SuperPod mesh AP in partnership with distributor AMT.
Plume is radically revamping its technology strategy under the leadership of newly appointed CEO Dan Herscovici and new CTO Chris Griffiths, both Comcast Xfinity veterans. While Plume in the past has been relatively restrictive in what hardware the Plume Cloud supports, the new Plume intends to be hardware-agnostic and fully standards-based, the company says.
“Our new strategy is all about making Plume’s leading technology available to more ISPs by supporting the technology choices that best serve their needs and those of their subscribers. We are fully in the software business now, but for our customers to realise the benefits of our platform, we will work with them on integrating our SaaS into what works best for them and makes deployment and scalability seamless. We simply want to be easier to work with and be their trusted technology partner,” says Dan Herscovici
Plume will be launching a certification program that allows hardware ODMs to certify their preferred gateway and CPE products for use with the Plume SaaS platform, which means a lot more freedom of choice for ISPs. “Our ISP clients can choose their preferred hardware and we will supply the turnkey integrated and fully certified hardware and software stack to support them. This also means that we will fully support TR-69 and TR-369 standards for management,” Chris Griffiths says, in a clear departure from Plume’s previous OpenSync-only strategy. Plume will also be taking all of its firmware integration work in-house, the company says.
The new Plume approach includes support for established open-source standards including RDK-B and prpl. “We intend to do more than just integrate Plume into RDK-B and prpl-based gateways, but rather be active participants in the future of these platforms by sharing our deep industry experience and understanding of service provider needs,” says Chris Griffiths.
The company will also be supporting their ISP clients in their choice of Cloud computing platform. “While we’ve so far operated the Plume platform exclusively on AWS, we are now moving to a Cloud-agnostic approach by supporting our customers in their choice of Cloud provider, including options like Google Cloud Platform. This is one more way making it easier for ISPs to work with us. We know these changes are important to our current and future customers, so we are prioritising this work,” Chris Griffiths says.
Plume is also fully committed to Wi-Fi 7. “Wi-Fi 7 combined with Plume’s intelligent platform promises faster streaming, stronger connections, smarter management, and superior support for service providers. Hence also our release this week of our Wi-Fi 7 SuperPods,” he says.
The iconic Plume Cloud-managed and socket-pluggable mesh ‘Pod’ (today ‘SuperPod’) is what originally what launched the company towards Wi-Fi stardom. The release of the Wi-Fi 7 SuperPod came at the ‘The Independent Show’ in Salt Lake City, Utah, last week where hundreds of smaller NCTC (National Content & Technology Cooperative) member ISPs were gathered.
Plume is introducing the Wi-Fi 7 SuperPod together with distributor Advanced Media Technologies (AMT) and so far more than 35,000 units are available for order by NCTC members. Plume says the new pods “eliminate dead zones, lag, and frustration” when managed from Plume’s SaaS. The elegance of the SuperPod system is of course that the mini-APs plug directly into electrical sockets to deliver blanket Wi-Fi 7 coverage while being largely unnoticeable in the home of office. The launch is primarily intended to serve the more than 700 small, independent NCTC members with Wi-Fi 7 services.
Plume named Daniel Herscovici new CEO in April and since then much of the company’s management team has been reorganised and strengthened with Chris Griffiths joining as CTO last month. In addition Plume recently added Marcio Avillez as Chief Commercial Officer, Dave Wechsler at Chief Business Officer, James Baber as Senior Vice President of AI and Data Products, and Brittany Taylor as Vice President of Strategic Operations. Read more about Plume’s new leadership and strategy here.
/Claus.
