Sylantro: UC the Pull for IMS

In a wide-ranging interview with FierceVoIP, Sylantro [1] President and CEO Marco Limena said unified communications (UC) is likely to be a pull through for increased deployment of IMS technology. He also stated many large UC deployments will end up as a hybrid model between hosted and enterprise-centric.

"IMS is a proposition that hasn't delivered," said Limena. "Service providers struggle to continue to invest and try to find business case for IMS deployment... It's a very large investment with lot of complexity. What service providers notice is there's no attention to application. All these equipment providers preaching an IMS solution are lacking on which application will generate those revenue for those expenditures."

UC provides a set of features for businesses for a case justification to invest in newer technology, a message coupled with productivity. As a result, equipment providers are toning down their IMS message and reworking their language to talk UC.

"UC is very focused, it has voice as a part of the capabilities," Limena said. "Add that to other collaboration tools, you build value with the existing customer base. I believe that UC will become the first instance of any IMS deployment... UC will be the pull through for IMS without full IMS capabilities. It is giving [service providers] justification for an IMS infrastructure deployment."

Another UC factor bringing carriers to the table is a hosting model that provides both carrier-grade service, as well as support for distributed workers outside of the enterprise network core. "All solutions with Microsoft and Cisco are not good enough for a large distributed enterprise," said Limena. "You need a hybrid between what is in the enterprise and what the service provider can offer. We're doing a large deployment of UC with Microsof for the Hanjin conglomerate... it's a very distributed enterprise. A premise-based solution won't allow for full productivity."

The solution, he says, is to provide a hybrid model between the premise-based solution in the enterprise and a hosted solution to service a distributed workforce and/or distributed locations. The Hanjin deployment uses a combination of Sylantro and Microsoft UC technologies, with Sylantro managing IP trunking and the distributed communications aspects.

Unlike other players in the market, Sylantro isn't interested in building its own developer community. Limena is focusing on service providers that are asking to do their own in-house development, rather than relying on a third-party ecosystem. Once service providers build their own applications more rapidly, they can offer features to enterprise customers through a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.

At the close of the interview, Limena revealed he had been a professional rugby player in Italy in his youth. Today, he sticks to windsurfing in the San Francisco Bay area.

Related articles:
UC battle begins; Cisco, Microsoft Lead [2]
UC technology speeds [3] manufacturer's development cycle