Pipeline Profile: Joe Matarese

SCTE member since 2003 Title: CTO, C-COR Solutions Broadband Background: Matarese joined C-COR in 2005 when it acquired his former company nCUBE, where he most recently served as the lead architect on deployments of centralized cable VOD systems. Your ET paper ranges from the economics of storage to consumer behavior to network design. Is technology strategy by necessity multi-disciplinary? Technology strategy must be multi-disciplinary in order to be most successful. A term often used to describe technology strategy that doesn’t take into account the economics of resources or the future demands of the market is "science project." Now part of a technology strategy is surely to do basic research and to do science projects from time to time, but this cannot be the whole story. It all needs to be connected back to consumer behavior at some point. Who is this "new consumer" that is transforming the consumption of content? I think the "new consumers" are "highly productive" and "time-constrained." They are demanding. Consumers want access to as much information as possible. They want control over when and where they access that information. They want the information instantly without significant premeditation, and they want it dependably. And did I mention they want to do this without having to deal with any of the underlying technology that makes this possible? Technology must be transparent to our new consumer. This is the bar that modern communications networks are being forced to live up to. But let’s not forget, we are all becoming "new consumers." Please remind us, what is an exabyte? An exabyte is 2^60 bytes or approximately 1,000 petabytes. A petabyte is 1000 terabytes, which is equal to the amount of content I expect to be able to store on a C-COR video server in a couple years. We’re nearly there. Are bandwidth and storage locked in a kind of eternal tradeoff? (That is, with no ultimate winner?) My personal belief is that bandwidth ultimately wins. People want information. This is why we say "Content is king." However, they need connectivity to get the content. They need storage if the connectivity isn’t very good. Conversely, if the connectivity is very good, then storage takes a back seat. Storage doesn’t go away, but gets consolidated to the most effective content origination points. For popular content, those origination points move toward the core of the network. Some of those origination points are the consumer as there’s probably always some amount of information that is too private to store in the network. If I read the logarithmic scale in Figure 1 correctly, hard disk drive (HDD) and dynamic random access memory (DRAM) have exhibited similar cost-per-megabyte declines. Do you foresee either one prevailing? If my assertions about bandwidth and storage are reasonably accurate, we would expect HDD cost-per-megabyte declines to start flattening out eventually, while DRAM continues on its merry way. Another thing to watch for is for Flash to displace HDDs, causing HDD declines to decelerate even sooner. I have several 1 GB Flash cards for my Treo 650 smart phone (with wireless service from Sprint). One contains a few hundred MP3s that I play with RealPlayer. Another contains all the detailed roadmaps for the United States and Canada that I use with the Tom Tom Navigator GPS system that runs on my phone. It’s amazing to have all these great applications and no hard disk drive! What was the significance of the shift in traffic a yearago from BitTorrent to eDonkey? My understanding, reading an analysis done by CacheLogic, is that the movie industry cracked down on illicit peer-to-peer file sharing through BitTorrent, and this caused file sharers to move to an alternative P2P application. Could you say a few words about this idea of MSOs and "six degrees of separation"? My attempt at humor with the Kevin Bacon reference was to suggest that the most important thing cable operators can do is to connect people together. Two individuals may not know each other, but they should be able to find each other and exchange whatever information they wish by availing themselves of communication services provided by the cable operator. I don’t believe in "dumb pipes." Dumb pipes can only provide poor and unpredictable services. Pipes must be smart. The only question is, how smart? The smartest pipe is the one that most successfully connects as many people together in as economical a manner as possible with policy enforcement and service assurance. As communications connectivity and bandwidth increases, I think people will access content from more and more diverse sources. Programmers will exist more transiently in time and space. The proverbial "long tail" will get longer and longer. The fact that 98 percent of the traffic on our networks is person-to-person indicates that the tail is already pretty long. So, yes, content will be the reason that networks exist, but the network is the common entity that everyone will pay for.