Interview with Marco Limena, CEO, Sylantro

You have recently articulated three main areas of focus: your traditional hosted PBX offering, mobility and Voice 2.0. How do these three areas gel together?

We are focussed on re-inventing voice for carriers. Although the contribution of voice in the overall telecom business is diminishing by the day but voice business generated over $1.2 trillion dollars for carriers last year. Re-inventing voice is a huge business opportunity. It can mean several things. It can mean integration of voice with PC based and mobile based applications. It can also mean making voice services available to the user anytime and anywhere he is.

From operator perspective they want certain common capabilities in their network. Take BT21CN project which is a reference blueprint in the industry. There is a push to minimize complexity of managing tasks. There are some common capabilities across networks and across services. That is what voice will have to adapt to. Sylantro’s multiplay application server will become a key application building block of tomorrow’s network architecture. It will serve as that common capability platform for different services. So in short our strategy has evolved to serve two areas: common capability multiplay platform and re-inventing voice.

You mentioned multiplay platform. There is one such deployment at Swisscom where the same feature server is being used for fixed as well as mobile voice. Right?

Yes. Swisscom deployed Sylantro platform when Siemens was their systems integrator. We deployed fixed line voice for consumer voice. At the beginning of this year Swisscom decided to merge and evolve their network to an IMS architecture to combine and converge two network architectures. And Ericsson took the lead and worked directly with us as supplier for the IMS architecture. Swisscom asked Ericsson to use the same feature server that was used in fixed voice. Today Sylantro platform serves the common voice capability in Swisscom network.

Any other operators out there that have deployed your platform for both fixed as well as mobile voice services?

Yes. Wateen in Pakistan is the largest IMS based VoIP over Wimax network. The service enables mobile Wimax at the access side serving both consumers as well as businesses. They launched the services in November and it has been a big success. Similarly we have a project going on with Korea Telecom. That is also a Wimax project where business customers are integrating VoIP with their Microsoft OCS platform. There are two large trials – one of them in the US – that also use our platform as a multiplay platform. These deployments really challenge the traditional FMC set up. We see a much more creative convergence than the traditional definition of FMC.
This multiplay thing is going to put demand in terms of scalability. Do you have such capability in your platform?

Our new release supports millions of subscribers on a single platform. Today, frankly speaking, there are no operators out there with such a large deployment planned in the immediate future.

With regard to voice-web mashups what is your opinion about Ribbit type approach of going direct to the consumer?

We come from the world that is focussed on high redundancy. And we are providing applications on top of those highly robust and highly reliable platforms. If you are going direct to the consumer you have to take responsibility of the end point and provisioning. Otherwise there are going to be problems. You need to have the capability to manage platform as well as the complex network. The question is how far will that scale.

Why do operators like BT manage voice-web mashups themselves? How do you motivate them to outsource that kind of stuff to someone like Sylantro?

While we do not provide services, we do provide technology to BT that can operate services within their network. So we fulfil the core need to service providers that includes a developers’ portal.

Out of your revenue generating business areas – the IP trunking, Centrex, and applications - what percentage is each of those three segments contributing? And what will be the revenue mix going forward?

Right now for us, IP trunking business is large in volume and limited in revenues. IP centrex is the largest contributor of revenues. Over the last year unified communications type and productivity type applications have given us access to large enterprises and we see these becoming large deals going forward. I see the productivity applications become are larger piece of our business going forward.

It is interesting to see you are gaining traction in the large enterprise segment? Are these people finally ready to embrace hosted PBX?

I believe that we are going to see a mix of hosted and premise based solution. Right now Sylantro is the only player that can enable such a solution. Service providers will have the opportunity to step in at some point because PBX makers will not have the capability of handling an evolved PBX that includes unified communications and mobility etc.

You touched upon unified communications there. You also enable mobile PBX type application or mobile unified communications. In the enterprise market why has the mobile unified communications not taken off yet? What are the limiting factors?

When we think about mobility we have to think of the user and not the mobile operators. While the operators – fixed or mobile – may have their own reasons to venture into FMC or mobile unified communications, we need to keep the user demand in perspective. And there are certain limiting factors there where companies like Sylantro may not be directly involved in. For example, battery life, security and accessibility of those devices, cost of those devices etc. Once you solve end user issues you will see the adoption.

Mobile operators can also go into an enterprise and get rid of the PBX offering wireless hosted centrex. What is keeping them from doing that?

There must be a good case of productivity enhancement to sufficiently motivate enterprises to give up their PBX and desktop phones.