Sylantro is all pepped up. You just have to see the number of recent announcements to get a sniff of that. One of the customer events I was keen on getting info about was the recent Sylantro Global Summit. We have been shifting focus from Class 5 switch replacement to hosted Voice-over-Broadband deployments within our VoIP quarterly tracking service. Broadsoft and Sylantro are some of the leading vendors in that space. And both had gone a little quiet over the last year or so.
Seeing a flurry of announcements from Sylantro is a welcome change. It is always good to hear from companies at the forefront of innovation. The vendor just concluded its customer summit which saw several high profile attendees. Broadsoft is about to start its customer event in three days’ time. It seems that the message Broadsoft is pushing through is ‘scale’. That is the impression you get from the press announcement about the event. Sylantro on the other hand tried to push through two main messages: multiple use of its platform (same platform being used by wireless as well as wireline networks) and the web extension capabilities. Through web extensions, Sylantro hopes to ‘Re-invent VoIP’. Sylantro has been promoting for several years its openness to work with web developers. There is obviously a lot of potential there. Potential.
Although Sylantro has been involved in several management changes over the past year or so, business has not suffered in the interim according to the vendor. One of the main business developments has been the rise in sales of business IP trunking application over the last one year. Sylantro has ‘formalized’ its business IP trunking solution and is selling a good amount of that to the market now. The vendor was not so bullish on business IP trunking two years ago.
At the summit, Sylantro announced a couple of new service provider accounts. That should take its customer tally close to around 100. Its present business turnover is approximately split into 50% residential VoBB, 25% hosted PBX, 25% business trunking. But there are other thrust areas as well such as mobility and hosted call center specific solutions. Nearly half the business is generated in North America. The other half is split mostly into EMEA and Asia Pacific.
Sylantro now has three development sites. Bangalore is the largest. Total number of engineers worldwide is about 150. The company has strengthened partnerships with Motorola and Microsoft. With Motorola, the company is involved in (potentially) one of the largest VoIP over Wimax deployments at Wateen. Tier 2 and tier 3 customers are served direct by Sylantro while for tier 1 accounts the company relies on larger partners.