More carriers turning to third-party providers

LogiSense announcement at Comptel reflects industry trend

VoIP, unified messaging, products and services

Comptel and CTIA both kicked off conferences this week, so we're in for another round of news from each organization's event. We'll start the newsreel highlights with an announcement by LogiSense delivered at Comptel Plus this week in Las Vegas. 

LogiSense provides hosted and managed IP billing and OSS solutions for carriers, cable operators, ISP and satellite service providers. The company announced it has most recently deployed its EngageIP Platform with Vibe Communications as a new customer; Vibe is a wholesale operator offering a managed suite of converged IP voice, data and network services.

ANALYSTS: Asian enterprises quick to adopt hosted and cloud technology

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Comptel and CTIA both kicked off conferences this week, so we're in for another round of news from each organization's event. We'll start the newsreel highlights with an announcement by LogiSense delivered at Comptel Plus this week in Las Vegas. 

LogiSense provides hosted and managed IP billing and OSS solutions for carriers, cable operators, ISP and satellite service providers. The company announced it has most recently deployed its EngageIP Platform with Vibe Communications as a new customer; Vibe is a wholesale operator offering a managed suite of converged IP voice, data and network services.

ANALYSTS: Asian enterprises quick to adopt hosted and cloud technology

In the follow-up interview we had with Flavio Gomes, the LogiSense company president, we asked about the trend for carriers to use third-party providers like LogiSense to deliver mission-critical applications such as call detail records as a hosted or managed service. Much like the enterprise that has turned to SaaS and CaaS, Gomes has found that service providers have also turned to companies like LogiSense because service providers have developed more trust, seen the potential for operational savings, and because a broader suite of both end-to-end and a la carte options are available to the service provider.

We asked Gomes what trends he sees among carriers given the choice between hosted options "in the cloud" and premise-based solutions for common back-office carrier functions like provisioning, mediation and rating. In his experience, even though some carriers are willing to use third-party billing and management systems, some prefer to host these systems in their own data centers, others are willing to accept fully managed SaaS solutions from the cloud, and some prefer a hybrid mix of both options.

So the bottom line for service providers who are promoting SaaS and CaaS: They seem to be willing to follow the advice they give their enterprise customers, leaving some applications to the experts.

Next time, we'll report in on UC and convergence related news from the CTIA conference in Orlando, Fla.

Read more about voip & convergence in Network World's VoIP & Convergence section.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Larry Hettick is a principal analyst at Current Analysis.