The hype is data, but the reality is voice.
It often comes in the language of converged services or unified platforms, but the inability of data to pick up rapid revenue has led vendors to use voice as the platform to drive data services.
While beating its chest that its messaging platform surpassed the 8-million subscriber mark, Lucent Technologies Inc.’s story was about data riding on the back of voice. The company said its AnyPath messaging system “turns a simple voice mailbox into a communications hub” and allows subscribers to “use voice, touch-tone or computer-based instructions to access, retrieve and manage all their messages (voice, text, photos and video) from a single mailbox through wireline phone, mobile phone, personal digital assistant or personal computer.”
The key enabler has been the voice XML technology, which provides an open interface that allows companies like Lucent and third parties to develop new voice applications.
Although key players are not saying there is a strategic shift in focus, they agree that a lot of resources go to voice these days.
“I don’t know of a shift of resources,” remarked Susan Miner, director of marketing at Lucent’s messaging business. “But Lucent has spent a lot on messaging.”
“Carriers are always interested in finding new services,” said Gennady Sirota, vice president of product management and marketing at Starent Networks. “Some of the services are like push-to-talk, voice instant messaging and a family of services that help to utilize IP to communicate via voice.”
Push-to-talk service leverages IP’s session initiation protocol for both voice and data applications.
Sirota said separate groups do voice and data, but the urgency of convergence is helping voice to drive data.
Miner said Lucent has enhanced its AnyPath solution to enable service providers to deliver Internet-Protocol-based applications, highlighting three broad benefits-its ability to enable a platform for enhanced services, choice of access and total cost of ownership advantage. She describes the total cost of ownership as ensuring cost for performance, which will double port capacity and increase subscriber capacity by 60 percent.
Among AnyPath’s features are its scalable design, greater density and capacity, integrated VoiceXML 2.0 interpreter, instant voice messaging enhancements and hands-free speech-enabled, Web-based applications such as speech dialing, speech messaging and speech information.
Miner said the solution also offers its distributed architecture, which allows servers to share resources, reduces messaging expenses on the backhaul and ensures text-to-speech capability.
“The 8 million subscribers and the new cost-for-performance benefits of the AnyPath system reflect the value customers place in our solution and our continuing commitment to deliver a cost-effective, flexible and scalable path to next-generation services,” said J.J. Lhospital, general manager of Lucent Technologies messaging group.
Starent’s Sirota said data services provide portability, but that is stationary. It is the voice platform that mobilizes the data using IP.
“It should not just be portable, but also mobile,” he said.
Also using the voice XML technology with XHTML, IBM Corp. announced a solution that makes voice a data enabler.
