Instant IMS No IMS Required

By Rich Tehrani
The benefits of IMS are great. We all realize this fact; moreover, service providers understand if they aren’t able to provide the benefits of IMS to their customers

soon they risk losing revenue. It is a fact. . . If service providers do not continuously look for newer and newer revenue generating applications to replace declining voice revenue, they are in trouble.

Enter Mavenir Systems (www.mavenir.com), a company based in Texas filled with some of the leading telecom minds in the industry. Mavenir’s mission is to allow carriers to provide many IP communications services rapidly. Generally, the services we are talking about are the ones we generally associate with the IP Multimedia Subsystem (News - Alert) or IMS.

Additionally, the company is positioned to allow devices which are not IMS-ready to have IMS functionality such as mobile Centrex over 2G. Mavenir works with a slew of endpoints whether or not they support SIP.

For example, to conference or transfer a call you simply enter a star code which is not audible to the other party or parties on the phone call.

Why would you want such functionality? Simple. By utilizing existing devices on the network your ability to recoup investments in new technology is potentially greater. Mobile Centrex and other services are not going to generate significant revenue quickly if most of the handsets on your network aren’t able to access them. Mavenir allows non-IMS compliant devices to share in the IMS party.

Mavenir agrees with the premise I have been espousing for many years. Service providers need to embrace VoIP and provide it with enhanced services to be successful. Another path many providers are taking instead is to “acquire” their way into this inevitable scenario.

But even AT&T, for all its acquisitions, has had to embrace new technology to take on the threats posed by new VoIP service providers and the cable companies.

I’ve been writing about enhanced services for years and service providers have been providing few of them during that time. Unfortunately for such providers, innovation is now coming from the computer world. An example is Grand Central (www.tmcnet.com/958.1) the maker of a service which allows find me/follow me solutions and was recently purchased by Google (News - Alert).

In my talks with many equipment providers — especially on the fixed line side, I am learning more and more about the paralysis taking place in carrier boardrooms. These companies see their voice minutes declining and generally are afraid to invest in voice anymore. In fact they aren’t sure what they should do.

In the wireless world there is still growth in voice service, but this doesn’t mean the entire service provider market doesn’t need to wake up. Remember the potential for Sprint (News - Alert)/ClearWire (www.tmcnet.com/959.1) and Google (www.tmcnet.com/960.1) to become major wireless competitors exists. This is no joke. Google owns Grand Central. What if they further become a wireless VoIP provider with a significant wireless footprint?

Service providers can only use M&A for so long to give the appearance of continued success. They need to both innovate and to start taking bigger risks while they still have a shot at staying successful in a world dominated by computer companies such as Apple (News - Alert) and Internet companies such as Google.

So, as service providers begin to implement IMS they need to consider the fact that Mavenir’s technology allows existing services to work in the world of IMS. So ringback tones, 911 and lawful intercept should continue to be functional.

Mavenir sells a universal gateway known as mOne which allows services such as video calls to become audio calls and back again to video calls depending on a device’s capabilities. In addition, device/computer cloning allows an IM (Instant Messaging) session to be cloned via SMS, thus allowing conversations to be transferred from a phone to a computer and back. The same goes for voice calls.

Furthermore, the platform provides presence detection on 2G networks.

The company has come up with marketing/product bundles for their customers and, in my opinion, they make sense. Of course, you can never predict how successful new offerings will be but these seem like logical ideas which will at a minimum increase “stickiness” and in the best case increase ARPU.

Here are some examples:

• Basic Mobile with Group Plan: Allows voice and texting over 2G handsets and group billing of multiple handsets.

• Desktop Edition: Allows VoIP calling for mobile customers with additional benefits such as support for consumer electronic devices in the home.

• Group Presence Package: Provides presence information for address book and integration between IM presence and the IMS server.

I did get to see some demos in the company’s Texas office which consisted of a video broadcast which I listened to on an analog phone and then saw it transferred to a video phone. When the call was transferred, the video signal was displayed.

There was also an FMC IMS demo utilizing the 3GPP VCC (Voice Call Continuity) standard. (You can find more on VCC and FMC here: www.tmcnet.com/961.1). This particular demo utilized the PCTel VCC client. I also saw a demo of a cloned IM/SMS session where both participants were able to use a mobile device or a PC to text message one another. The idea here is the ability to continue text conversations seamlessly across devices.

Mavenir Systems (News - Alert) seems to have found a sweet spot in the service provider world as they facilitate the rapid deployment of new services across existing devices while at the same time allowing IMS-based networks to more easily tie into carrier networks’ currently existing systems and devices.

Is this an IMS replacement? Perhaps. But it seems to me that “IMS stepping stone” is more like it. If you are a carrier, you should be spending time researching web services which provide advanced telephony functionality. There is a window of opportunity for service providers in which they can still be the innovators in the next generation of IP communications. This window is brief. It is highly recommended that you keep an eye on the VoIP 2.0 revolution and another on what Mavenir Systems is up to.

Acision (News - Alert) is Born

When a single U.S. phone company, Verizon, reports that in one month they were responsible for sending 10 billion text messages, you may want to stand up and take notice.

To learn more about the SMS space, I took a trip down to Plano, Texas where the U.K.-based Acision (www.acision.com) has one of its four U.S. offices. The company was formerly named Logica CMG and is one of those companies most people have never heard of but provides technology many of us frequently use.

In short, the company is an enabler of various types of service provider messaging from SMS to voice and video. This month in fact the company celebrated its 15th anniversary of supplying the industry with Short Message Service Centers or SMSCs.

Thanks to Moore’s law and clever design, the capability of Acision’s SMSCs has dramatically increased over the years. In 1992 SMSC version 1.0 had a capacity of 10 messages per second. Today a single rack of the IP-based SMSC can handle 16,000 messages per second, with the ability to grow to “virtually” unlimited levels according to the company.

In Texas I spoke with Acision’s Senior Vice President, Oswin Eleonara (you can call him “Oz”). This dynamic company spokesman tells me his company enables 300 clients to serve a billion customers. Whereas they’ve focused on the burgeoning international SMS market in years past, they now see tremendous potential for U.S. messaging growth and will redouble their efforts on these shores.

The company does more than messaging and recently entered the market of real-time behavioral analysis and predictive analysis, allowing service providers and advertising companies to determine how best to serve a target audience with ads. Their system also entails a marketing dashboard and has the ability to determine which group of people is most likely to buy specific offers sent via specific media methods.

Acision also has a speed browsing application which allows browsing at speeds 70x greater than today, according to Oz. The company also plays in the rating, intelligent charging and content enablement spaces.

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