DPI or Information Extraction? - Making the difference

I just got back from the Broadband World Forum where I met a number of people to whom I had to describe the core competency of Qosmos. I realized that many people are not aware of the difference between DPI and Information eXtraction (IX for short).

Put simply, Deep Packet Inspection could be described in the following terms: it recognizes network traffic, it has the ability to act on the traffic, and vendors typically sell complete solutions for specific markets such as lawful intercept, traffic optimization, etc.

Information eXtraction – IX, on the other hand, is different: it actually extracts network information and makes complete sense out of it; ix doesn’t act on traffic flows. In the case of Qosmos and IX, the focus is on best-in-class network intelligence, for use in other people’s complete solutions. As a matter of fact, DPI specialists can even build their solutions based on an Information eXtraction engine like Qosmos.

This is Qosmos’s real differentiator, and if those we met at the BBWF were to take away one thing it should be this. Once potential users of information extraction understand this, the horizon is suddenly different. And a wealth of possibilities opens up – I’ll describe this in an upcoming post.

Jerome