We've been making trips up the Dallas North Tollway to visit the folks at Prodea Systems for more than two years. We've been waiting for the company to come out from under the radar, because up until now, they are most well-known for having been founded by Anousheh, Hamid and Amir Ansari, the founders of Telecom Technologies, which was sold to Sonus Networks. Anousheh was a "space tourist" on the International Space Station in late 2006.

Prodea looks to make a splash at CES with a "digital lifestyle command center." Although the piece of customer premise equipment looks suspiciously like another VUDU box, what Prodea has done is to supply an end-to-end solution for the service provider community to deploy a range of services. Prodea notes that likely applications will revolve around home network management, aggregation and backup of personal and internet media, remote access to all networked devices in the home, delivery of interactive entertainment such as VoD and digital broadband radio, carrier-grade VoIP, home monitoring, energy management, e-Health services and additional easy-to-use applications to be provided in the future.

It's an interesting strategy, and one that might certainly fit with a "better/best" approach that I'm hearing as a desire from the telecom industry in particular. Yes, telecom operators are deploying FTTx networks and advanced triple-play and IPTV services using the standard systems integrators, back-end solutions, and CPE partners. However, where I see Prodea finding a position is in helping perhaps smaller carriers with a turnkey solution that can provide very well managed core services (voice, video, data), but then also add the value-added features that we know carriers will need to create sticky services, keep customers happy (and retained), and drive new revenue streams.

Prodea says that they have five service provider partners that they'll announce soon. I'll look forward to hearing more.