|
NewsGlobe: Today's News
Tango waltzes into enterprise IMS
Broadens product line to enable FMC for businesses
by Jim Barthold
Enterprises could be fixed-mobile convergence’s (FMC) first movers and
Tango Networks wants to be ready to help when they make that move.
The Richardson, Texas-based vendor has broadened the GSM and IS-41
capabilities of its Abrazo FMC product to help providers more effectively
integrate their FMC offerings with legacy, hybrid and IP-based PBXs.
(see Converging Paths - FMC: Where Wireline & Wireless Meet)
“The carriers are moving toward IMS infrastructure (and) deploying IMS
core networks,” said Al Leo, vice president of business development at
Tango Networks. “They are absolutely looking for applications to offer
across those IMS networks.”
Enterprise Drive
One of those applications will be offering FMC capabilities to enterprise
customers. Tango’s new capability is available immediately and will be
deployed soon with an unnamed wireless carrier in North America, Leo
said.
“Our application is the same … integrating and making the mobile phone
an extension of the PBX,” he said. “Now that can be offered on an IMS
core network within the carrier environment.”
The Tango product looks like an application server off the core network
interfacing with carrier network elements so “this becomes an application
that leverages the investment they’ve made in the rest of their IMS
network” to feed hosted enterprise PBX applications, Leo said.
The new functionality helps the enterprise user facilitate calls and
anchors those calls in the right fixed or mobile network, including voice-
over-Wi-Fi.
“We put certain parts of the I-CSCF (Interrogating Call Session Control
Function) and S-CSCF (Serving Call Session Control Function) in the
Abrazo E in the enterprise and that’s where we are IMS-enabling a PBX,”
he said.
Tango’s primary customers are medium-to-large enterprises with about
2,500 or more employees.
The need for FMC and the flexibility to be
mobile via cellular or Wi-Fi is obvious for some high-line executives and
so-called road warriors who are frequently away from the office. There
is, however, a larger, potentially more important, audience that could
prove lucrative for the carriers but is not quite so obvious.
“We’ve seen research that something like 70 percent of an enterprise’s
employees are away from their desks more than 20 to 25 percent of the
time. They need to be reachable; they need to be accessible; they need
to access back into the various applications or capabilities that they
have in the network even if they’re across the street or down the road,”
he said. “One of the things these large enterprises will be able to do is
define how more employees can use their mobile phones and give those
phones to more people to increase their accessibility and productivity.”
This, in turn, benefits wireless carriers who will sell more mobile services
to enterprises and can turn up an FMC offering with connectivity to the
wireline PBX.
Smaller businesses will be more apt to purchase FMC-based applications
from carriers as part of a hosted or managed toolkit, Leo said.
The Tango solution is truly fixed and mobile, including a Wi-Fi element for
those that choose to go in that direction and offer dual-mode phones
within the enterprise environment instead of mobile or cell phones, he
continued.
“Our fundamental strategy is to address the broadest part of the
enterprise network that we can. We’re not going to get into the middle
of the debate that says voice-over-Wi-Fi is good, bad or indifference.
We’re saying that in certain applications certain enterprises may choose
to deploy voice-over-Wi-Fi; other carriers, other enterprises are going to
be satisfied with the wide area network that the carriers offer.”
Moving IMS down to the enterprise level, he said, was a no-brainer for
the company.
“We clearly needed to be able to interface our application into an IMS
environment and there are some specific interfaces that are required to
do so,” Leo said.
“Our application is the same; it’s the same capability of
integrating and making that mobile phone an extension of the PBX, but
now it provides the ability for that to be offered on an IMS core network
within the carrier environment. To carriers we look like an IMS application
server and we interface into that core.”
|
