180SQUARED, Inc. was founded in 2006 by a group of Microsoft Mediaroom Alumni to provide enhanced software and robust services for IPTV Middleware platforms.  180SQUARED has been employee funded since incorporation, and to this day remains cash flow positive.

At inception, the primary goal was to provide scalable and cost-effective applications to enhance subscriber experience and simplify integration into the middleware.  However, in order to achieve this, the experienced team at 180SQUARED recognized early on that certain common IPTV Middleware limitations had to be addressed:

• Regular Update: IPTV Middleware platforms aren’t really in the middle. They are more akin to operating systems. They have changes, and those changes can be dramatic. Maintaining a software base on an ever-changing platform is burdensome and inefficient.
• Statelessness: IPTV Middleware platforms are stateless entities, very similar to network elements. They don’t understand higher order logic or complex business rules.
• Policing: IPTV Middleware platforms may have rules about how to work within a set of parameters; however they don’t enforce them. This could allow software developers to accidentally put the system into an unstable state without anyone’s knowledge.
• Data Authority: When developing applications, some system needs to be Authoritative for all subscriber and device information. In some cases, the IPTV Middleware platform becomes that system. Since these platforms were designed to scale for subscribers not for backend systems. The constant polling of data and/or importation of new data can be unsustainable.

And hence, the 180SQUARED Framework was born.  The Framework is a middleware-agnostic, encapsulation layer that exposes a service-oriented architecture to allow for an agile, extensible and scalable development platform. It provides:

• Quality of Service (QoS) monitoring, load-bearing management and policing functions to protect the stability of the middleware implementation
• A consistent set of APIs for development and integration of systems and applications, irrespective of the version of the middleware

With the 180SQUARED Framework in place as a single, scalable foundation, 180SQUARED has created v.Orchestra – a complete suite of products, services and solution sets that manage, integrate, and enhance IPTV middleware platforms to enable service providers to rapidly and confidently roll out rich, subscriber experiences.