By Philbert Shih, theWHIR.com
June 20, 2005 – (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Among efforts to expand their overall offerings and generate more revenue, Web hosting companies have been looking into voice over IP in growing numbers.
The service delivery platforms hosts deploy, for the most part, do not include VoIP provisioning and management capabilities. But in recent months, some automation vendors have made a push to incorporate VoIP into their platforms. Rodopi Software (rodopi.com) integrated VoIP provisioning into its operations support system OSS, and last month Ensim (ensim.com) acquired TeleGea, a provider of service delivery solutions for hosted VoIP services.
Software giant Microsoft (microsoft.com) is certainly aware of the growth in VoIP and is integrating VoIP service delivery capabilities into its hosted messaging and collaboration platform, announcing recently that it would develop and market VoIP solutions for telecommunications service providers through a partnership with Sylantro Systems (sylantro.com), a provider of software for hosted communications services.
The companies have integrated Sylantro’s hosted VoIP communications platform Application Feature Server with the Microsoft Solution for Hosted Messaging and Collaboration, a platform built on the Windows Server System that enables service providers to deliver its popular hosted email, collaboration and communications services Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Sharepoint and Microsoft Office Live Communications Server. With the integration, service providers will now be able to offer customers VoIP on top of email, collaboration, instant messaging and desktop services within a single solution.
“The integration of our hosted VoIP communications platform with popular Microsoft applications and operating systems allows our service provider customers to deliver powerful new communications and collaboration options for their enterprise and small to medium-sized business customers,” Pete Bonee, president and CEO of Sylantro Systems, said in a release.
Michael O’Hara, general manager of the service provider business within the Communications Sector at Microsoft, says hosts continue to look for ways to expand their offerings in order to add value and profits. And they have expressed considerable interest in VoIP, he says, because businesses are looking to service providers for a single communications packages that carries email, messaging and collaboration services, along with telephony services such as VoIP.
“There was a pull form our customers, and our customer’s customers, to be able to offer a complete package,” says O’Hara. “So essentially combining those two offers together and allowing small to medium-sized businesses to buy from their carrier, their complete service, including voice and data type services.”
Hosts see an opportunity in VoIP, O’Hara says, because of the high rate of broadband penetration and the potential profit margins.
“The voice piece carries a nice price, a business VoIP phone service is somewhere between 40 and 50 dollars a month … so there are certainly dollars available.”
O’Hara believes there is a great deal of potential because of the growing integration between desktop services and voice, and the low cost of delivering voice services using VoIP.
“So what we see here is the deep integration between your online desktop tools and your ability to launch voice features from those tools,” he says. “It’s really going to be a key driver for the adoption of VoIP.”
O’Hara envisions an environment in which workers can control all their data and voice services from their desktops and integrate them with their mobile devices. They’ll be able to instant message, divert phone calls to their voice mail and launch conference sessions simultaneously from the desktop, he says. And with Microsoft still the desktop operating system of choice, VoIP would have a powerful potential launching pad.
“I think the power that we have here … actually building in the control of the voice capabilities deep into the Microsoft desktop suite, I think gives us a strong offering, particularly for businesses.”
The bottom line is that VoIP gives hosts, small and large, a value-added service that is very easy to deploy and makes not only economic but practical sense.
The Sylantro solution will be ported to the Microsoft Windows Server platform and other Microsoft technologies. The solution was demonstrated earlier this month at SUPERCOMM in Chicago.
Microsoft has been active in the hosting space, updating the Microsoft Solution for Windows-based Hosting and launching a worldwide series of technical seminars on shared Web hosting. The company says it has re-committed itself to the hosting space.
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