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Carrier Services
Cisco and Italtel Extend Partnership
Unveils Managed Enterprise Voice Solution
by Ken Wieland
The product is already shipping and has customers but, even
so, Italtel and Cisco decided to ‘unveil’ it anyway at the BBWF
event yesterday – its jointly-developed IN-BVS (Integrated
Networked Business Voice Solution).
Combining Italtel’s softswitch capability and the Cisco
CallManager, the product is aimed at service providers and IT
companies who intend to offer a managed voice service
solution to medium and large enterprise customers. And because the
platform can support multiple customers, economies of scale
can be achieved.
Mauro Righetti, Italtel’s CEO, said that the IN-BVS was already
being used by ‘four major service providers’ and that the
number of lines supported totalled 100,000.
Paoli Campoli, director of solutions and business
development at Cisco, said that today’s announcement
was ‘one of the boldest’ in the managed and hosted voice
market for enterprises. “Using Italtel’s softswitch, this gives
us the carrier class element that has been missing in our
hosted solutions [to date],” he added.
Executives from Italtel and Cisco both believed that the
market for managed voice services – among medium to large
enterprises – was about to take off. Righetti said that the
banking industry, utilities and public authorities were
particularly keen to move to a unified, all-IP communications
network.
“Enterprises know that to develop new applications [quickly
and cost-effectively], both for themselves and their
customers, then an IP network is a prerequisite,” said
Righetti.
According to Ovum, the managed services market will grow to
U$14 billion per annum by 2009 with managed IP voice services
growing at the fastest CAGR (71 percent).
Italtel and Cisco have been working together since 2000, but
formalised their strategic alliance in early 2005 to provide
technology solutions aimed at service providers. Last month,
the two companies extended their partnership to 2008 with
market coverage going beyond the EMEA region into Latin
America.
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