Interview with Sean Brady, CEO, VoIP Solutions
You offer turnkey IP Centrex and wholesale residential VoBB services to ISPs in EMEA. What in your experience are the main factors while scaling up the deployments?
Provisioning is becoming more and more important for our customers. The technology is 
obviously important but equally important is how to provision these services to the end customers. I guess security is the other main challenge while scaling up the deployments.
Your customers are telephony operators, ISPs and system integrators. So far which segment out of those customers have you seen more inclined towards VoIP services?
Broadband ISPs continue to be the segment where you see the largest uptake. VoIP is obviously the way to attract more customers and also maintain the market share besides providing a revenue stream on top of the broadband delivery.
The ISPs are obviously not going to stop at VoIP. They want to offer triple play and perhaps explore quad play as well. Are you contemplating some sort of wholesale offering for VoIP plus IPTV plus wireless?
We see IPTV coming in to allow triple play and we have a number of partnerships for that. Further when the customers will move into a quadplay scenario we have secured a number of partnerships to allow them to deliver a quadplay service. We have worked with a number of billing companies to ensure we can bring a single billing BSS/OSS platform to help them deliver triple play and quadplay.
What is your wireless VoIP strategy?
Certainly we have seen a lot of development going on in VoIP over WiMAX. We are watching that technology very closely. We have already secured one customer which is a wireless operator deploying VoIP successfully using this technology. We see it as a very interesting alternative where DSL network isn’t well established.
How do you judge the prospects of pure-play VoIP companies?
I think VoIP-only service providers are going to face difficult time to differentiate purely on VoIP. On the other hand, triple play offering brings in the billing problem which I talked about just now. The challenge for VoIP-only providers is to differentiate purely on cost with bundled services. Offering VoIP nearly for free or at flat rate will be the solution that will win out in the future in my opinion.
We have not seen VoIP taking off in Ireland and low broadband penetration is supposed to be one of the major reasons. Do you agree?
Yes Ireland has witnessed one of the lowest broadband penetrations in Europe. There are a number of reasons for that. Ireland is one of the smallest and low populated countries of Europe. Also the legacy infrastructure has been a barrier to broadband. But things are changing. We have seen huge increase in broadband adoption over the last two years.
What is the overall VoIP scenario in Ireland?
Major VoIP players in Ireland are Eircom, BT and Digiweb. There are some other coming up - especially Portico, Magnus and Irish Broadband.
Can you name some of your major customers?
We have gone public with a number of joint press releases with our customers. One being Digiweb in Ireland.
Which vendors do you work with by the way?
Broadsoft for feature server, Covergence for SBC, Atria for provisioning, MIND CTI for billing. And of course we work with partners for CPE and these include Patton, Quintum, Polycom and ABM.
