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Tag: voices-of-the-industry

  • WiMAX MENA: Gulf Offers "Real Opportunity" For WiMAX


    Richard Jones has just overseen the largest WiMAX deployment in Europe, Africa and the Middle East for a telecom startup in Saudi Arabia.

    Yet the managing partner of Ventura Team said his biggest concern is whether WiMAX will make it as a technology.

    "LTE is coming. The difficulty is can WiMAX be in service before LTE arrives?"

    Jones told smartphone.biz-news that WiMAX is suffering from not having a "poster boy" to accelerate its adoption, perhaps a contributing factor to why it has failed to take off so far in India and the US.

    Another is cost.

    He said that despite there being plenty of WiMAX development around the world, prices for base stations are still high.

    "Volumes are needed to get down the production price because WiMAX is still expensive," he said.

    "The economies of scale that could normally bring equipment costs down will not occur. It’s a real challenge."

    Richard Jones, managing partner of Ventura Team

    Jones said WiMAX has to succeed and the key to increasing the number of subscribers is a successful deployment.

    "If that happens, other people will get confidence in it."

    He is part of an expert panel at the this week’s WiMAX MENA Forum in Dubai discussing how WiMAX can create profitable opportunities for new entrants in the Middle East and North Africa.

    His 16-month stint as Chief Commercial Officer for the Saudi Arabia company making the WiMAX deployment makes him well qualified to comment.

    Jones said the Gulf does offer a real opportunity since it is a market with relatively low broadband penetration.

    The area’s mix of villas and apartments often means it is not possible to put fibre in economically.

    In addition, there is the presence of an incumbent and the fact the industry has been slow to de-regulate means prices remain relatively high.

    "DSL is very poor in the region as a whole," he said. "There’s a long distance between people’s houses and exchanges, so no-one is getting a reasonably fast DSL service from the incumbent."

    Earlier this month, ZTE announced that it has partnered with Etihad Atheeb Telecom (Atheeb), the largest WiMAX operator in Saudi Arabia.

    They have agreed to build the Kingdom’s first nationwide WiMAX network.

    What WiMAX offers, according to Jones, is coverage which is so far lacking.

    "WiMAX provides an interesting opportunity for companies to provide broadband in areas that are uneconomical for fibre and places where people would not get a DSL service," he said.

    The existing gap in the market has led to a rise in 3G services but Jones said the opportunities for WiMAX are considerable.

    "WiMAX is still there. There is still the potential for services based on WiMAX to cover lots of subscribers not covered by fixed and around the 1-2 meg broadband service," he said.

    Jones said that WiMAX has become the fast roll-out technology of choice.

    But he said it is also being exploited by fixed licence operators in the Gulf who currently have a very good 3G service.

    In this situation the operators may have a WiMAX license – obtained at a fraction of the cost of a mobile licence – that doesn’t allow them to do anything mobile with the technology.

    But when licences are unified to pave the way for fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) these carriers will be able to become good quality mobile providers.

    "What’s happening is that people are using WiMAX as part of a very innovative strategy," said Jones. "There are huge cost saving to be made."

  • WiMAX MENA: Roll-Out Strategy Key To WiMAX v LTE Debate


    Arguing that WiMAX is a better wireless 4G system than Long Term Evolution (LTE) – or vice versa – is a waste of time.

    That’s the view of Dr Hans-Peter Petry, head of radio access and transport at Detecon International, who is adamant that it’s pointless claiming either side in the 4G debate is superior to the other.

    "I would violently fight against those that say LTE is better than WiMAX," he said. "This is absolutely wrong.

    Even so, Petry, who is a speaker at this week’s WiMAX Forum Mena in Dubai, said that a key question in the WiMAX community is how it compares to other wireless technologies.

    He is addressing this in his presentation to the conference, which is entitled: Exploring The Capabilities Of Potential 4G Candidates And Understanding The Best Parameters For Benchmarking And A Successful Rollout.

    As part of this, Petry will "clarify the landscape" – essentially spelling out what makes a technology 2G, 3G or 4G.

    He told smartphone.biz-news this is necessary because many people are confused by what a technology has to offer before it can be classed as 4G.

    "There is a lot of confusion in the market," he said. "A lot of protagonists are confusing people with conflicting messages."

    "For 4G there are very clear pre-requisites and without them being implemented in the technology, you can not claim it is 4G."

    Dr Hans-Peter Petry, head of radio access and transport at Detecon International

    So WiMAX partly belongs to 3G – along with LTE and Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) – and only in certain circumstances can they claim to be 4G, according to Petry.

    He said Detecon had defined a metric that enabled each of the technologies to be evaluated in a fair way.

    This included: marketing, geography, services, tariffs, and technology inputs.

    "All these parameters are important for an evaluation," he said. "We have mapped these into a single Service Production Cost (SPC)."

    So it is possible to show the SPC for individual technologies under similar conditions.

    Petry said this has produced some "astonishing results", the outcome of which shows that the decision on which 4G technology to implement is not a question of the technology.

    "Under the same boundary conditions, the difference in the technology is minor."

    Where there are differences, according to Petry, they lie in the roll-out strategies.

    He said this came down to whether an operator is looking for coverage first, then capacity or vice versa.

    "The recommendation is that before you talk about the technology, talk about other things such as roll-out strategy," he said.

    So factors such as the kind of customer, whether the area is green field, brown field, rural or densely populated, all have to be considered.

    Petry said boundary questions then had to be dealt with before, finally, talking about the appropriate technology.

    "Then you can choose the right technology," he said. "Do not choose WiMAX because you think it is better than LTE."

    As a footnote, Petry said he believed LTE would ultimately capture a larger market share than WiMAX.

    That may prove correct, but as the performance and capabilities of WiMAX and LTE get better over time, the competition between them will become less important than that between wireless and wired broadband.

  • Storage Class Memories – Changing the Face of Storage and Computing


    Vijay Karamcheti, CTO, Virident Systems to give Luncheon Address on the "Real World Challenges and Opportunities of Storage Class Memory in the Data Center" at 2009 NVM Conference

    Storage Class Memories (SCM) have been touted as the memory of the future – blending the high performance of DRAM with the persistence, high capacity, and low cost of solid state storage.

    Systems, sub-systems and software for these new memory hierarchies are just now coming to market using enterprise class Flash, and in the near future, new memory types like Phase Change Memory.

    The internet data center may represent an attractive new market for these new technologies.

    These new systems and memory approaches are clearly a very exciting development for the industry, but like all new technical innovation, it comes with a unique adoption curve that is a function of software, systems, semiconductors and customer requirements and expectations.

    At the 2009 NVM Conference, ‘Beyond Flash – Defining SCM’,  Karamcheti, also  Associate Professor of Computer Science at NYU has been invited to give a special luncheon keynote speech on the real world challenges of implementing Storage Class Memories now and for the future. Dr. Karamcheti will share key lessons from Virident’s experience building systems and software using the first generation of newly emerging storage class memory technologies, and highlight future challenges and untapped opportunities.

    The 2009 NVM Conference will also have two panel discussions. Session 4, the first panel is on the memory components for Storage Class Memories (SCM) either RAM-based or cross point storage-based components and what applications they can serve.

    Session 4 Panelists are:

    • IBM – Richard Freitas
    • Industry Memory and Storage Executive – Steffen Hellmold
    • Intel – Al Fazio
    • Numonyx – Sean Eilert
    • Qs Semiconductor – Bob Goodman
    • Unity Semiconductor – Darrell Rinerson

    Session 7, the second panel is on ‘Emerging Architectures for SSDs’ that illustrates new ways SSDs can be developed and architectured within the new storage hierarchy that uses SCM or further enhancements on NAND Flash.

    Session 7 Panelists are:

    • Fusion-io – David Flynn
    • IBM – Andy Walls
    • Intel – Sanjay Talreja
    • SandForce – Radoslav Danilak
    • STEC – Scott Stetzer
    • Virident – Vijay Karamcheti

    Attendees will be able to glean how to improve the design of their memory components whether it is Flash, DRAM, PCM, RRAM, or other technologies and to enhance their cache and SSD products.

    These issues with SCM and their likely candidates are being examined at the 2009 NVM Conference ‘Beyond Flash – Defining Storage Class Memories’ put on by Web-Feet Research and Denali Software.

    The 2009 NVM Conference will be held during Denali’s MemCon event on Wednesday, June 24th at the Santa Clara Hyatt.

  • HiT Barcelona: Telecoms Industry Has To "Reinvent Itself"


    Telefónica’s Carlos Domingo provided an interesting glimpse of the corporate navel-gazing underway at one of the largest fixed-line and mobile telecommunications companies in the world.

    The giant Spanish giant isn’t renowned – amongst its customers, anyway – for being at the cutting edge of innovation.

    But Domingo, Telefónica’s director of internet & multimedia and director of its R&D center, showed that it is grasping the nettle of change required if the challenges facing itself and the industry generally are to be met.

    Speaking at the HiT World Innovation Summit in Barcelona, he pointed to declining revenue growth in traditional broadband and mobile markets and the strong competition for the new revenue sources that are emerging.

    Innovation is the key to meeting this challenge, he said, but it means that companies like Telefónica have to change their mindset and innovate differently.

    Carlos Domingo, Telefónica’s director of internet & multimedia

    "The telecoms industry will have to reinvent itself in the face of the challenges ahead," he said.

    Until the liberalisation of the telecoms market in 1997, Telefónica was the only telephone operator in Spain and still holds a dominant position.

    But the incumbent has faced increasing competition in its domestic market – both in fixed and wireless.

    Aside from market changes, Domingo said the evolving telecom ecosystem had created the need for a different approach to innovation.

    He highlighted shorter time-to-market and development cycles, the need for permanent betas and the emergence of global markets, but with finer segmentation.

    The end result is that companies have to be able to anticipate the moves of competitors while coming up with their own innovative strategies.

    "We have to think more as a poker player than a chess player," he said.

    Transparency is a big part of this, according to Domingo, who outlined what he described as five "paths to openness".

    These cover the consumer, employees, the network, devices and innovation.

    The advent of social networking, where people reveal the minutiae of their lives on the likes of Tweeter and Facebook, is one such example.

    "The closed way of communicating to customers is something that they do not want because they expect to be treated the same way as they are in other parts of their lives," he said.

    "If you’re no longer speaking your customers’ language, if you no longer live in their world, the disconnect will be costly."

    As well as the need for transparency over tariffs, Domingo also spoke about how critical it is to have open tools like APIs and SDKs for developers.

    He said that telcos have "unique and valuable" assets that could potentially be mashed up with others.

    Domingo acknowledged it wasn’t always easy for developers to approach Telefónica with ideas, but he added that they can always email him directly.

    A refreshing approach and timely presentation – how that translates through a giant organisation like Telefónica will be interesting to see.

  • HiT Barcelona: Android Marketplace To Overtake Apple's App Store?

    INTERVIEW: Florian Seiche, vice president of HTC Europe, spoke to smartphone.biz-news ahead of his keynote address at the HiT Barcelona World Innovation Summit.

    He talks about the potential for Android’s Market app store and the opportunities that open source platforms offer as the mobile internet "explodes".

    Android’s Market will be at least as successful as Apple’s hugely popular App Store – and could prove even more of a hit.

    That’s the view of Florian Seiche, vice president of HTC Europe, who believes app downloads for the open-source software platform developed by Google could well emulate Apple’s success.

    Off the back of the iPhone, that success has been phenomenal – in April the App Store clocked up one billion software downloads in the nine months since it opened.

    However, Strategy Analytics recently predicted global shipments of Android-based smartphones will grow 900 per cent this year and it expects it to become a top-tier player in smartphones over the next two to three years.

    If that happens – with a range of Android-supporting handsets on the market – then Seiche’s forecast for Android apps will undoubtedly become a reality.

    He spoke to smartphone.biz-news before travelling to Spain for the HiT Barcelona World Innovation Summit,where he is making a keynote speech titled "The Application Explosion".

    He said the key to the whole mobile application ecosystem is to make it a really viable business for software developers.

    App Stores Vital

    One factor in this is for each open platform to have a central app store where consumers can discover what applications are available.

    "The iPhone has been extremely strong because it was the first to go out with a centralised market place," he said.

    "The Android Market will have at least the same impact, if not more. It combines a central marketplace but there is a much wider choice of devices being offered."

    Florian Seiche, vice president HTC Europe

    While the recent proliferation of app stores – LG is the latest to announce it will be launching one shortly – may cause consumers some confusion, Seiche said software had to reach consumers.

    "For the immediate future, the most important thing is to make applications as available as possible for the consumer," he said.

    "It’s a good thing for each open platform to have a central place where applications can be accessed."

    There’s no doubt HTC would benefit from Android becoming a global success story.

    Ties to Android

    The Taiwanese company was one of the founding members of the Open Handset Alliance, the first product of which was the Android mobile device platform.

    And the HTC Dream – also marketed as T-Mobile G1, Era G1 in Poland, Rogers Dream in Canada – was the first phone to the market using the Android platform.

    So HTC has been closely involved with Android from the beginning.

    However, Seiche said HTC’s role goes back further, to the late 1990s when it was founded.

    "We focused our entire vision and strategy on smartphone devices," he said.

    "We did this at a time when the mobile phone market was growing very strong across the world but it was still very much a voice-centric market with just the basic parts of the data world emerging in the form of text."

    Even then, Seiche said HTC had set its vision on a completely different kind of device – one that brought together what people were doing on PCs with mobile devices.

    He said being in at the infancy of smartphone development has helped HTC over the years to pioneer technology such as touchscreens.

    Evolve and Change

    His address on Friday at HiT Barcelona will look at HTC’s role in the smartphone evolution but also look at how the market will continue to evolve and change.

    The first of two big themes that Seiche will cover is how mobile devices will drive and revolutionise what’s happening on the Internet.

    The second is the open platform revolution, which is resulting in the proportion of handsets with open operating systems rising exponentially.

    Seiche said that with the help of industry collaboration, third party developers now had access to some very credible and powerful ways to distribute their applications.

    He said that was opening up a whole new market, as consumers saw how apps tailor-made for a mobile environment were improving the mobile experience.

    "That will continue to grow even stronger," he said. "At the end of the day, all of this should benefit the end user."

    However, Seiche said empowering the end user by enabling them to personalise smartphones was only possible in a world with open platforms – where users decide what apps are relevant and important.

    He said HTC’s role in this is to ensure it designed user interfaces that allowed users to quickly and intuitively access the mobile Internet, including connecting with services such as social networking.

    However, HTC has no plans to enter the app store arena, according to Seiche. Instead, he said the company sees its role as providing the "best possible framework" for the end user.

    "Then it is to arrange the world they create in an easy and compelling way," he said.

    HTC has also developed dedicated apps and widgets on its phones to allow users to access information ranging from stock movements to weather forecasts.

    Mobile Internet Boom

    If HTC is enthusiastic about Android, it is equally positive about Windows Mobile – the OS used in the majority of its smartphones.

    With Microsoft due to launch its own mobile software store shortly, the growing choice for consumers can only be good news for HTC.

    Seiche said the mobile Internet is about to "explode" with third party developers innovating strongly.

    "It’s a great opportunity for us," he said. "We see the main shift in the market towards open platforms.

    "We see opportunity in offering choice with different platforms, but always with great user experience at the top level no matter what the operating system."

    Smartphone.biz-news will be covering HiT Barcelona – please check our site for the latest news and interviews.

    HiT Barcelona: World Innovation Summit: June 17-19 FIRA Barcelona

  • West&Central AfricaCOM'09: African Mobile Growth Opportunities Attract Record Numbers


    While the African teleco market may not capture the headlines as much as other parts of the world, that’s not to say it’s being overlooked by the industry.

    So it’s good to see the organisers of West & Central Africa’s largest telco event announcing record pre-registered attendance for the AfricaCOM event in Abuja, Nigeria.

    Ian Hemming, CEO of event organisers Informa Telecoms & Media, said the 554 companies from 53 countries that are attending represent a 44 per cent uplift from last year.

    Getting underway today, the two-day event caters for the region’s whole telecom ecosystem – fixed, mobile, wireless, satellite and integrated operators and service providers, investors, regulators, vendors and analysts.

    Among the companies attending for the first time is Movius, the Atlanta, Georgia-headquartered messaging, collaboration and mobile media solutions specialist.

    Michael Edgett, director of product marketing at Movius, said the company – formed in 2006 with the merger of IP Unity and the Messaging Division of Glenayre – has had a presence in Africa for a long time.

    Its most recent dealings have largely been through channel partners, such as Nortel and Nokia Siemens, and South Africa-based operator MTN, which works throughout the region.

    However, he told smartphone.biz-news they also did some direct sales and, as part of the drive to build on these, Movius representatives are attending the AfricaCOM event for the first time this year.

    "Most of what we have been doing in Africa has been very simple voicemail and a few off-shoots," he said. "But we are seeing more growth opportunities and doing more ourselves."

    Edgett said this meant the company has been able to extend its presence in the area and show off some of its other products.

    For instance, Movius’ Voice SMS enables a user to send and receive an audio message, with a text message alert – allowing longer messages to be left.

    "We are starting to see a lot of interest in Voice SMS in parts of the world where literacy is low or there are multiple languages," said Edgett.

    The Voice SMS suite consists of both clientless solutions as well as Fun Talk SMS, a client solution that includes avatars, ringtones and background music.

    Movius’ Visual Mail Suite includes MessageMe Plus, a clientless visual mail service that functions on any phone using SMS or MMS.

    "There has been a lot of interest in Visual Voice Mail as a clientless solution and Voice SMS in general," said Edgett.

    Another area receiving attention is Community Messaging – which provides a service to people without phones by giving them a personal phone number that can be checked from a public phone.

    Edgett said this was attracting a lot of interest, particularly in rural areas or where people had moved to cities but wanted to contact friends and family in rural areas.

    Edgett said focused shows such as West & Central AfricaCOM have proved to be of real value in developing new markets.

    "We have continued to see a lot of growth in Africa and do not expect that to change," he said.

  • INSIGHT: External IT's Joseph Stedler on the Advantages of Storage Virtualization in Private Clouds


    DataCore Software has announced that hosted IT-as-a-service company External IT has standardized on its SANsymphony storage virtualization software to serve as their storage area network (SAN).

    With VMware virtual servers, Citrix XenApp and DataCore storage virtualization, it allows External IT to deliver a complete virtualization infrastructure.

    Joseph Stedler, senior engineer and Dallas data center manager, External IT, said this is in the form of private computing "clouds", tailored individually to a specific client’s needs.

    He said he had worked with traditional SANs for eight years and has had firsthand experience with every major hardware SAN – including EMC, HP and NetApp.

    "There are various, major drawbacks to hardware SANs. One is the fact that there is a single point of failure at the disk level," he said.

    "This is particularly the case when doing, for example, firmware upgrades – on the controllers, on the disks, on the shelves – whereby you have to take the SAN down to perform that task.

    "The second most irksome characteristic of hardware SANs is their cost. These EMC SANs, these HP EVAs are inherently expensive, particularly during upgrade time."

    Stedler said there are capabilities that DataCore brings to the table that he "absolutely loves".

    "The concept of having two SANs as your one SAN environment is just elegantly simple," he said. "You have an ‘A’ side and a ‘B’ side."

    Stedler said the beauty of this is that if you need to do hardware maintenance or firmware upgrades, an administrator can actually take down half of the SAN and still have the other half serving production traffic – completely uninterrupted.

    "The second, major benefit of DataCore for External IT has to do with performance," he said.

    "With DataCore, you will experience enormous performance gains. The performance that DataCore delivers is nothing short of awesome."

    Other benefits that make up the "DataCore Difference" for External IT include Seamless Maintenance, Disaster Recovery (through asynchronous replication) and the Flexibility to create your own SANs.

  • HiT Barcelona: Can Mobile Operators' New Openness Change Lose-Lose to Win-Win?

    Mobile operators are finally ditching proprietary operator APIs – so-called "Walled Gardens" – and moving towards exposing network intelligence to third parties.

    Next week’s HiT Barcelona: World Innovation Summit in Barcelona will be discussing the need for open networks in order to engage with the growing community of application developers.

    Representatives from the developer, operator and Internet communities are taking part in a panel discussion to develop the most effective approach for the GSMA’s One API initiative.

    Among them is Michael Crossey, chief marketing officer at Aepona, who spoke to smartphone.biz-news about some of the issues that will be coming under the spotlight.

    Mobile network operators seem to have done their utmost to prevent developers from innovating on the mobile Web.

    They have created barriers by using proprietary APIs – and contractual differences have limited the creation of cross-operator web applications.

    Equally, developers have been barred from accessing rich network capabilities such as authentication, seamless charging, location assistance, push messaging and connection awareness.

    This has undoubtedly been a lose-lose situation for both operators and developers.

    That is changing and according to Michael Crossey, chief marketing officer at Aepona, the whole mobile industry theme has moved towards one of openness in the past year.

    He told smartphone.biz-news that the main catalyst for this has been Apple’s desire to make it easy for developers to create applications for the iPhone by providing them with tools and a route to market for their apps.

    Michael Crossey, CMO at Aepona

    "This has sparked off a flurry of activity in the industry, with a lot of operators and other handset manufacturers announcing open strategies to help them tap into the activity of the developer community worldwide," he said.

    This is a marked change in tactic for carriers, whose expressions of interest in working with developers in the past have been superficial at best.

    "The reality has been that, while they welcomed creative thinking, they wanted to cherry-pick the best apps for themselves and bring them into their own networks to sell," said Crossey.

    This, obviously, hasn’t been in the best interests of developers and everyone from Google to the "two men in a garage" set-ups have found ways of getting around the networks.

    That realisation has finally hit operators, forcing them to "evolve their thinking", according to Crossey.

    Last Bastion Crumbling

    He said this has meant that the mobile operators "last bastion" – opening core network capabilities to developers – is crumbling.

    "Historically there has been a lot of resistance to that," he said. "But they are realising that unless they collaborate, they will get by-passed.

    "They look at the fixed-line world, where operators have lost the battle against over the top providers, and they are determined not to let that happen to them.

    "They realise that if they collaborate rather than close the networks, they can contribute to the process."

    It is widely accepted that one way to do this is to standardise API’s and interfaces within and across operator networks.

    The GSMA is leading the charge to adopt this approach – principally through its One API initiative, phase 2 of which has just been launched.

    Crossey said this strategy is seen as necessary because even if every operator opens its network, developers will still have problems because of the different approaches each carrier adopts.

    This would be both on the technical side and on the commercial one, because every operator’s interface is different – be that with regard to terms and conditions, payment methods, business models etc.

    Huge Breakthrough

    By creating a cross-operator API, Crossey said it is hoped the fragmentation that would otherwise exist between operators will be reduced.

    The GSMA is also proposing a common commercial framework to give developers a market for their apps.

    "The operator can be assured that if it complies with One API, this will be portable between operators – this is a huge breakthrough for operators and developers," he said.

    "If there is fragmentation, the whole ecosystem does not reach critical mass and the addressable market is not big enough.

    "If there is a single set of APIs, the internet model has shown that the developer community is huge."

    Operators may, understandably, be reluctant to embrace One API because of concerns that it would restrict them from differentiating their services from a competitor’s.

    However, Crossey said the technology means that it is possible to do both – have an API model for "commonplace" services such as messaging while still being able to differentiate on, say, video and multi-media capabilities because a particular operator has invested heavily in IMS technology.

    Crossey said that Aepona, as a specialist SDP (service delivery platform) provider, enables the operators make their network capabilities – communications, information and intelligence – available to developers.

    The Web Services-based APIs can then be used to telecom-enable both enterprise business processes and web-based consumer services.

    "We provide a technical platform that allows these capabilities to be exposed to developers in a way that they are familiar with on the internet," he said.

    On the web, developers use APIs to create apps that, for example, use Google maps and mash-up with PayPal or Amazon storage services.

    Crossey said that after preaching the message of openness to operators for a number of years, there has undoubtedly been a definite shift in operators’ willingness to embrace the concept.

    The Belfast, Northern Ireland headquatered company’s products have already been deployed by Tier 1 operators such as France Telecom/Orange, Sprint, Vimpelcom, Bharti Airtel, TELUS, TDC, BT and KPN.

    "We are having many other conversations now about operators using our technology," he said.

    Opening Up Potential

    Aepona is also working with developers to help them bring apps they have created to its operator clients.

    This involves showing developers how they can use network capabilities to greatly enhance their apps for use on the platforms Aepona has installed with operators.

    Crossey said a simple example is explaining that, rather than just relying on GPS data from high-end handsets for an app, developers can be shown that operator networks can provide location data for every handset.

    "So we can increase the addressable market to a huge degree," he said. "But very often the developer is not aware of what can be done."

    A shift towards openness has also to include ensuring developers feel they are sufficiently rewarded for their applications.

    If revenue-share models fail to do this developers will keep finding workarounds and alternatives to leveraging network capabilities.

    For more information on the HiT Barcelona: World Innovation Summit: June 17-19 FIRA Barcelona, click HERE

  • INTERVIEW: Carriers' "Sea Change" Towards IP Networks, JAJAH CEO Trevor Healy

    JAJAH CEO Trevor Healy talks to voip.biz-news about the "sea change" currently taking place in the communications industry – and explains how that has resulted in JAJAH itself evolving from a consumer VoIP focus to become a global IP communications platform provider.

    Telecom operators realise their business is shifting – what they do about it is another matter.

    One company that appears well placed to offer an opinion is JAJAH – not least because it is about to sign "three or four" operators globally to use its IP platform.

    Since its launch in March 2006 it has gone from being a web-activated calling solution to a platform of choice for outsourced IP managed services, partnering with a growing number of carriers, telcos and technology companies to white label its services.

    Trevor Healy, CEO of JAJAH, said there is no doubt that mobile operators’ views have evolved over the last two to three years.

    JAJAH CEO Trevor Healy

    He told voip.biz-news that their attitude to a service like mobile VoIP has gone from ‘this is not going to happen’ to ‘it’s a problem on a small scale’ and had now reached ‘it’s going to happen and we have to be involved’.

    "When we started our business we always had these strategy debates internally about whether we should engage the operators," he said. "We knew it would take time for them to get their heads around it.

    "Now we are close to signing three or four operators globally to use our platform."

    Healy said JAJAH is offering carriers a fully serviced data communications platform, from which they can then cherry pick services such as payment and billing, fraud protection and termination engines.

    He said the carriers would use the JAJAH IP platform for a number of different things.

    "Some want to effectively capture more international call traffic, either originating or arising in their country," he said.

    "They now understand that customers are using this tool for long distance calls. But rather than build a platform themselves it’s easier for them to partner us and OEM our platform."

    Healy said operators didn’t only want to capture domestic calls but also those made by displaced internationals.

    "So, for example, it could be an Irish operator trying to capture all Irish callers in the US," he said.

    At the other end of the spectrum were operators such as Japan’s EMOBILE who are working on pure Voice over HSDPA.

    "They are right at the edge of the technology curve," said Healy. "Then there are the WiMAX guys who are coming to us saying ‘we need something to bridge the gap between now and then."

    Another "market" for JAJAH is operators that are experiencing saturation in their domestic markets and who are looking to find new sources of revenue.

    This is the case in Italy, according to Healy, where there are two mobiles for every male in the country.

    "So because of this they need to go overseas," he said. "As they go international they look at how they can build up their market internationally."

    Healy said he expected to see interest from the Tier 2 operators first, since they were facing far more competition.

    And he said the Tier 1s would probably try and integrate platforms internally initially, a process which he reckoned would see some failures and provide "pickings" for JAJAH.

    "There’s definitely a sea change in the operator landscape – and it will continue to evolve," he said.

    "We are trying to evolve a business model philosophy. The CAPEX model is not going to work.

    "If we do not put a barrier in front of these companies, we will drag them along to our vision."

    That vision has been developing for the past three years, during which time JAJAH has been shifting its focus away from just providing the mobile web VoIP model of free client-to-client calls and low-cost international rates.

    A year ago the Silicon Valley-based company began providing VoIP back-end operations to customers such as Yahoo and Match.com.

    It formed a strategic partnership with Intel to get its technology onboard next-generation PCs and offers a range of software clients to support VoIP calling on WiFi.

    However, the real emphasis has been on becoming a service provider as well as a brand for end-user calls. At the end of February, JAJAH signed a deal with BoldCall to provide online retail customers with JAJAH’s click-to-call services.

    Healy said JAJAH has effectively re-invented itself three times in its corporate life, while staying in the same core market.

    The genesis behind the changes had been seeing the flow of dollars from large companies into enterprises, which then wanted to offer new solutions to their customers – very often their employees.

    "We started as a consumer business. What we did for consumers, we did very well," he said.

    "Then other companies started saying: ‘why not open up your platform on an OEM/white label basis?’"

    The resulting evolution has seen JAJAH design its IP platform to suit three general participants in the market:

    • Enterprises – especially large multinationals such as Pfizer
    • Internet companies – such as Yahoo, that use JAJAH’s platform to carry voice
    • Operators – who want to make a platform for OEMs

    Healy said the initial part of this business model change saw JAJAH offering its services to large companies.

    Then Yahoo asked JAJAH to integrate voice into its messaging platform for its 100 million IM users.

    "More recently we re-invented ourselves again by putting it into the cloud and offering a purely managed service to companies like Yahoo with no upfront fee," he said.

    "We started to see unified communications in the cloud."

    Healy said they saw what the likes of Microsoft, Cisco and Oracle were doing in enterprises and identified a "sweet spot".

    He said they realised that enterprises had a lot of front-end applications but no connectivity.

    So large corporations with offices worldwide were having to organise and invest in UC – effectively replicating JAJAH’s offering.

    "So we reiterated our platform as a full platform for enterprises, moving into UC," he said.

    While enterprises have always featured in JAJAH’s activities – there are more than 5,000 businesses using the platform at any one time – this shift into UC on the cloud is a new niche.

    However, Healy said various factors mean the company is well placed for the change.

    He said JAJAH is global by nature, connecting into 220 countries around the world, and its consumer background means it understands what services and apps people are using outside the office environment.

    This global connectivity is device-agnostic – the company has an "anything in and anything out" philosophy of connectivity – and it has mobile solutions for a wide range of devices.

    In financial terms, the change in emphasis has meant revenues shifting in favor of infrastructure activities.

    Healy said this is increasing every quarter and is nearly at an 80-20 revenue split between the IP platform and consumer sides of the business.

    "Having said that, the consumer business is a very good one and is still important because it’s our sandbox to test a lot of our offerings," he said.

    "When we bring it to a carrier, it’s been seriously tested. A lot of companies are doing their testing in a lab environment and then testing it in an operator’s environment."

    Healy said the VoIP calling business had also proved itself on a small scale – it has more than 15 million subscribers.

    "If our consumer business was in the hands of a bigger brand and with more investment then it would be a huge business," he said. "The model works and consumers are very loyal."

    It has been necessary to concentrate on the platform side at the expense of the consumer business, according to Healy, because JAJAH is a small company and can’t afford to dilute itself too much.

    He fully expects the company to reap the rewards from this approach.

    "In the long term, enabling others to do what we do is the better strategy," he said.

  • HDD Not Threatened by Virtualisation, Claims Western Digital


    Western Digital has dismissed the growing trend of virtualisation among enterprises as a possible threat – and instead emphasised the indispensable value of internal hard drives in businesses.

    Noel Timbol, business development manager at WD, said recent virtualisation efforts undertaken by companies have not made any dent on the sales of their Enterprise models.

    Speaking at the launch of WD’s new line of internal HDD (hard disk drive) products at Computerworld Philippines, he told TechWorld that "even if companies are migrating their data centre operations abroad, they’d still need hard drives for simple internal operations".

    WD is currently the second-largest hard drive manufacturer in the world, and currently leads the market for portable hard drives.