Verizon Business Arm Taps RIM for FMC Service
Verizon Communications’ business services division is to announce a raft of fixed-mobile convergence offerings, the most important of which uses technology from Research In Motion for PBX service extensions to cellphones.
The announcements, which will be made at the NXTcomm event in Chicago, will comprise PBX extension, a Wireless Office offering of pricing plans with discounts by geography or numbering plan, and an extension of the command and control capabilities for Verizon’s conferencing service to mobile phones.
PBX Mobile Extension is the most significant of the three because it represents Verizon’s first proper foray into FMC. Mike Marcellin, VP of product marketing at Verizon Communications, said the service is based on the Ascendent technology acquired early last year by RIM and launched by the Canadian push email heavyweight last month as a product called Mobile Voice System.
It works by deploying an Ascendent server alongside a corporate customer’s PBX to enable the integration of fixed-line extension numbers and mobiles. It works with pretty much any PBX manufactured in the last 15 years, be it legacy TDM, hybrid, or all-IP, and requires no client software to be loaded onto the mobile phone. This means there is no messing around with the deployment of clients for specific smart phone OSes. It also enables extension to feature phones without an open OS to which client software can be downloaded. What the corporate user gets from the service is a one-number, one-voicemail service where both deskphone and cellphone ring when someone calls an extension number.
The Wireless Office service is a clever billing offering where a corporate customer defines either a geographic region as determined by specific cell sites, or a range of numbers within the private numbering plan it has on its PBX where calls will be charged at fixed-line rather than cellular rates.
Jim Elter, associate director of product development at Verizon Wireless, said that in the case of the geographic region option, no PBX is involved because the mobile network will know where the person is calling from by cell site address. The second alternative is more SMB-focused and enables calls from subscribers’ mobile numbers to be routed back through the PBX at the office.
Wireless Office is a Verizon Wireless offering so subscribers to other mobile networks who take Verizon Communications’ fixed-line services can’t avail themselves of the service, and equally Verizon can’t roll it out to any other country because it has no cellular spectrum outside the US. The PBX extension service, by contrast, can and will be offered internationally because it is independent of the mobile network used by the customer.
The third service, Mobile Conference Connection is also something Verizon can take international. Verizon has long offered an ad hoc audio meeting facility whereby participants can be sent a call-in number and passcode to log into the meeting, said Marcellin. While mobile users could take part in those meetings, until now the conference leader function was restricted to someone on a fixed-line connection phone or a web interface. “Now we’re extending that capability to cellular users,” he said. They will now be able to coordinate spontaneous meetings while away from the office. Users wishing to gain this capability have to register the first time, which gives them the ability to download an additional plug-in for the purpose.
Marcellin said the service will be available inn all major geographies around the world later this month. Because it relies on a client download, it can only be used on smart phones, and at the moment that extends to BlackBerry devices with version 4.0 of RIM’s OS and phones running Windows Mobile 5.0 and later versions of the Microsoft OS. With regard to Symbian, Marcellin said “we’ll look at where the demand is.”
The same also goes for PBX extension technologies other than that of RIM, and the obvious candidates are likely to be from Cisco, Avaya, or Nortel, all three of which would present the limitation that they would only work with the respective vendor’s PBX platform. However, Verizon gives the impression that if enough Cisco CallManager customers ask for it, it would be prepared to take it on board.
Our View
It is testimony to RIM’s M&A skill that the Ascendent technology it acquired just over a year ago should now be the basis of an FMC offering from one of the Big Four in global managed WAN provision.
PBX extension as a technology has been around for a number of years, predating the VoIP revolution by quite a while, and in and of itself, it doesn’t offer cost savings in the way as, say, a service based on dual-mode phones with calls switching over to WLAN infrastructure when made on corporate premises and potentially in other WiFi-enabled areas such as hotspots or hotels. This is why the Wireless Office part of today’s announcement is important to further support the offering, but that is only a US-specific service. If Verizon is to add the cost-saving bit to PBX Mobile Extension when it rolls it out across other geographies, it is going to need mobile operator partners with whom it can offer the discounts, something its president John Killian suggested would be the subject of announcements later this year.