In order to differentiate VoIP from plain old telephone service, you need to offer advanced applications, and in order to do that, you need a platform.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [October 14, 2008]

"We are seeing a natural convergence with the pure IP world," says Shirish Andhare, vice president of marketing at Campbell, Cali.-based Sylantro Systems (R&D is in India).

Founded in 1998, the company is a VoIP veteran that has been arguing that convergence was the future for many years.

Andhare's mission at Sylantro is to introduce web services to Sylantro's VoIP portfolio. The company's Synergy platform, which it calls a multiplay Application Feature Server (AFS), is designed to enable those VoIP services that pundits have been calling for but which the VoIP industry has, for the most part, not delivered.

The initial applications will be basic. It's call logs and voice mail and click to call and click to conference and group presence. But that's not the area that's impressive.

Andhare is most proud of the AFS, which will deliver a framework and a catalog so that small companies can offer innovative applications and mashups within the AFS.

As an ISP, you're already dealing with the kind of problem that Andhare is addressing here. If you're Tucows, you're implementing single sign on and making sure that anyone who subscribes to one of your applications knows about everything else you offer.

If you're Sylantro, you're looking to innovative companies from HP to Ribbit to Amazon to deliver the complicated applications, and you're bringing everyone together at the Sylantro Global Summit, Oct. 13-15 in Las Vegas. One of the participants, VoIP Logic, will be familiar to ISP-Planet readers.

Getting the apps to the people
Here's a simple but interesting app: Sylantro partner Quova has developed an application that can look at an IP address and tell you its physical location within a five or ten mile range. It takes a lot of work behind the scenes. There's a map of proxies and IP addresses that Quova is constantly updating. The app enables intelligent click to call for services such as plumbers that do not usually participate in IP telephony.

"There is a critical need in our industry," says Andhare, "to move from talking about the technology to really articulating and evangelizing the benefits of IP-based communications."

The telcos are good at delivering a one-sized-fits-all app to millions of people. Andhare says that Sylantro's AFS helps developers deliver tailored apps to small and local businesses.

For example, Andhare says, a local web developer working for the public library might deliver a n application to remind callers about their overdue books. "The ability to give this developer the chance and opportunity to build applications remove huge barriers," he says. "The company delivering the application may be making $5,000 per month. It's not a powerhouse company."

Application developers need to make the end user experience intuitive and simple, he says. "Our service providers sell to day to day administrators, or someone not even in technology. If a service provider has already spent $200 acquiring a customer, a half house customer call can add $100 to that cost. If the service provider is charging $25 per user per month, that call pushes out the break even time several months."

Does Sylantro encounter business politics, where someone in an office is afraid of losing a job function with the introduction of IP telephony? "It's a political issue that needs to be addressed," Andhare says, but he thinks attitudes will change over time.

The future
In the future, the AFS will work hand in hand with SaaS applications, and Andhare is quick to point out that it already works with the poster child of SaaS, SalesForce.com.

Is Digium a competitor? "Given how the ISP world has already embraced Apache and the LAMP stack, their willingness to try Asterisk is probably higher than that of the average small business," admits Andhare. "We counter that we continue to innovate and aggressively organize our ecosystem. The Digium world is full of do it yourselfers."

The final piece of that AFS puzzle is tracking applications so that service providers can charge for them. "You can bill in new ways, such as pay as you go or a revenue share."

The applications you're seeing may not seem all that new—yet—but Andhare says that Sylantro is focusing on the entire life cycle of the application, from innovation to monetization, building an impressive incubator for services.

—End