|
Carrier Services
Moving Up the Telecom Vendor Food Chain
NMS Communications Readies Media Servers
by Jim Barthold
NMS Communications, sensing industry demand for faster, more complete product suites, is ready to push the envelope and begin building media servers that consolidate the pieces of their component offerings.
“This is a completely new focus for NMS,” said David Asher, the company’s product management director. “The core of our business and how we make most of our money is selling board level signal processors and network interfaces along with software infrastructure APIs to build telephony applications. What we’re doing that’s very different now is making that available in a server format.”
Since NMS has traditionally sold components to vendors like Lucent, Avaya, NTT and Fujitsu that, in turn, built their own media servers, this move seemed to be competing with customers. Several years ago that would have been the case, Asher conceded, but not now.
“With all sorts of changes in the business environment over the last year we’ve seen customers turn around and say it’s time to outsource. There are a lot of technologies, like video, that they can’t keep pace with. They have new applications to get to market, fewer people than before and now NMS can serve them better by being a commercial media server vendor,” Asher said.
That, said Brian Partridge, senior analyst-communications network infrastructure for the Yankee Group, reflects the new telecommunications industry where speed and standards are overwhelming what was once a painstakingly slow process of taking components and building a platform.
“Instead of being able to buy four tires, an engine and a chassis you can buy a full car from NMS,” Partridge said. “You can still get the tires and the chassis and the engine, if that’s the way you want to go.”
Partridge said he expects NMS to continue to make money selling boards and other components.
“NMS isn’t getting out of the boards business; they are just expanding the range of products they can offer,” he said. “I think there will probably be even more of that than demand for their new product for a while, but over time this is going to change.”
When it changes, NMS wants to be ready with a media server platform that expands on the capabilities of current products and gives vendors a better drop-in product to get to market quickly, said Asher.
“Our go-to-market really doesn’t change; we’re still a component vendor, we’re just making our customers get to market much, much faster,” he said.
NMS, said Partridge is “doing what they need to do to move up the value chain in the eyes of their core set of stakeholders and customers. I think that’s the right thing to do. I know that’s what their customers are telling them to do.”
|
