Clever security offering making money for telco service providers

Let's face it, the telecommunications industry is very competitive. Most monopolies have been broken up, services are commoditised and most operators are struggling to find key points of differentiation.

It's difficult to make money out of just the connectivity business these days. The real profits come from the over the top services.

The struggle for these over the top services like cloud and data center is that they're also commoditised and it's difficult to compete with global pure-play providers like Amazon Web Services.

One of the last areas that service providers can differentiate themselves and achieve high margins is in security-as-a-service.

Wedge Networks is a global leader in this specific niche.

They believe antivirus, web and malware security shouldn't be done on the device, but at the service provider end, with a clean pipe provided to the client.

This can then be charged by the service provider in many different ways, although typically on a per pipe per month basis.

Wedge actually doesn't develop its own security architecture, instead it develops a clever scalable platform and then plugs in specialist security vendors like McAfee, BitDefender and Kaspersky for the scrubbing tools.

The magic Wedge offers is that its platform is telco grade, can cope with massive volumes of traffic and it easily connects to billing applications, and services can be applied per customer.

There are a number of advantages of this approach for the customer as well. Not only do they not need to license antivirus themselves but not having these security solutions on each device can save serious processing power.

This in turn can allow a large enterprise to sweat the asset a little longer before replacing it.

If you take this Capex saving and multiply it up across large enterprises, this can be a ROI bonanza.

Finally the service provider sales and marketing departments might have a ROI calculation that really is compelling, especially to enterprise customers.

This approach has clearly got the attention of service providers, with Wedge Networks booking more revenue in the last quarter than the prior 18 months. That's an enviable growth curve for any business.