Azaire Networks is one of the most experienced startup vendors in the FMC space. The company has worked with carriers for several years for implementing FMC. Its solution mainly enables multimedia session continuity. However the vendor also added the voice call continuity (VCC) feature in the first quarter of this year. According to Azaire, the market has been lukewarm to the VCC implementation in general. And we can substantiate that observation. There is perception in the market that we are still facing the lack of VCC compliant handsets.
Three is also some confusion among some service providers who regard IMS as a pre-requisite to do FMC, which is not true the way most FMC vendors including Azaire have engineered the product. In addition to that, the prevailing opinion is that VCC standards development is behind IMS development timeframe.
For Azaire there has however been an upswing in interest in multimedia and data continuity capabilities (seamless data mobility across cellular and WiFi networks on dual mode devices) which has been its strength in terms of product orientation. That comprises most of Azaire’s current business. The launch of T-Mobile FMC service in the US which has gone national - and the iPhone launch - should be able to generate more interest among the carriers for multimedia continuity.
Azaire’s early implementations in Austria and Australia tended to be just data connectivity for laptops. In latter deployments in Germany and Taiwan, the company added combinations of laptops and high-end PDAs that have dual mode (wifi-gsm) capability.
Trials signed up in most recent quarter include Orange in France and one in Portugal. In terms of the number of customers, Azaire has 12 active deployments and 7 trials. The ones that are commercial offerings include Optus, Rogers, Chunghwa, Mobilkom, and T-Mobile. These service providers are primarily using the multimedia data continuity application except Rogers that uses the security gateway solution of Azaire within their UMA architecture.
Security solution for FMC is another product feature of Azaire platform. Since the Azaire platform is data centric, the security solution has been built as carrier grade. Competitors include Audiocodes, Ericsson and Reefpoint in the UMA security gateway area. For the core product, the multimedia continuity platform, Azaire has from time to time competed with the likes of Tatara, Alcatel-Lucent, Stoke, and Bridgeport Networks.