Taqua Under Your Hood?

There are a few key trends that have emerged over the past year, including an increased focus on green IT, continued growth of the wireless broadband market, certainly cloud computing and virtualization, and a general increase in the convergence of communications platforms.

What binds these trends is an underlying understanding that vendors cannot do it alone. With the rapid pace of development, changing customer demands, and simply the need to remain competitive in a tightly contested market, telecom vendors have to collaborate with their peers if they intend on being around by this time next year.

Nowhere was this more evident that at the Taqua (News - Alert) User Group Conference in Dallas, where more than 50 Taqua partners and users convened to discuss not only the Tier 2 and 3 telecom landscape, but, more importantly, how they, as a collective, were leveraging available technology to bring new solutions to market.

Fittingly, the event was preceded by a day at the Texas Motor Speedway, watching the Dickies 500, which effectively sealed Jimmie Johnson’s record fourth consecutive NASCAR Sprint (News - Alert) Cup title. I say fittingly because in many ways, NASCAR represents a microcosm of the telecom carrier space, with each racer having to choose with whom to “partner” at different points in the race, and make the right decisions regarding pit stops, in order give himself the best chance at competing for the checkered flag.

That’s just what all the attendees at the conference were looking to do – find the best ways to leverage their partnerships to deliver better services to their customers. The common factor, of course, is the TaquaWorks platform (the Taqua 7000 switching system with integrate BroadSoft (News - Alert) BroadWorks applications), which helped the company grow 80 percent in 2008, and 40 percent through the first half of 2009. But there is plenty of room for more.

Taqua CEO Eric Pratt, the opportunity is ripe for the Tier 2 and 3 providers – they don’t get caught up in the bureaucracy that typically keeps Tier 1s from being more agile, and are better positioned to partner with others in the space for the same reason (not to mention the fact they don’t have delusions of grandeur causing them to believe they don’t need many friends).

“I do believe this is a family, and together, what we’ve done in the past few years has been amazing,” said Pratt. “We’re hoping you will also take advantage of what we’re all doing together now.”

What are Taqua and its partners and users doing? After Pratt’s opening address, the rest of the day was focused on how the TaquaWorks platform has been leveraged to provide converged services. Largely, the focus was on wireless services, which as Taqua’s vice president of marketing Frederick Reynolds told me back in September at ITEXPO (News - Alert) West, is perhaps the biggest differentiator for the Taqua 7000 switching platform – it integrates legacy, broadband, and 3G/4G wireless access in a single architecture.

The focus on wireless was expected, not only because of the converged capabilities of the TaquaWorks platform, but because, as Nsight Executive Vice President Rob Riordan noted, people are replacing their traditional phone services with VoIP and are looking to integrate with their wireless devices, but the one thing that has become evident is the greatest challenge is a common understanding of how the wireless carrier fits into the scenario.

Traditionally, wireless carriers have been reticent to lose minutes to VoIP other non-cellular technologies, but in order to succeed in the long run, carriers have to give the customers what they want.

“It’s not about just being a voice pipe – it’s about offering a package the customer wants and needs, about making something hard easier, and doing it at a price point that works,” explained Riordan. “We’re in the personalized communications business – that’s what we all have to understand.”

Ed Cox (News - Alert), vice president of marketing at Varaha, suggests that there is actually an opportunity here for wireless carriers that now have an entry to the user desktop, which is where the real battleground is. “With desktop ownership, you become the brand, the product, the value… otherwise, you are merely the pipe,” he says. (Cox must have said something right, for the majority of the audience skipped the cookie and coffee break to hear more from him.)

The successes these company executives described ultimately boil down to two principles: Keeping it simple – as BroadSoft CTO Scott Hofflault’s noted, the key is to keep it simple: “If the user can’t understand it, it probably won’t be very successful” – and making the right choices.

Despite the complexities of a switching platform that is effectively access network agnostic, putting the TaquaWorks platform under the hood has allowed these companies to achieve both goals. Pratt believes the momentum Taqua has built together with its partners and users is only going to grow: “We have the ability to rock the industry – and we’re going to do it.” IT

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