* Hosted vs. premise-based VoIP
Today we hear from Sara Hughes, director of product management and Rob Russell, director of product marketing at Tekelec for their views about hosted vs. premise-based VoIP solutions. Tekelec is a network applications company that targets global wireline and wireless carriers. The company has a broad portfolio of gateways, applications servers, switches, and service creation systems.
Our discussion with Tekelec focused on feature parity between a premise-based VoIP system and a hosted system. Based on the features offered on the Tekelec 6000 VoIP Applications server, we believe that hosted solutions have achieved feature parity with the premise-based IP-PBX alternative.
But one issue that remains to be solved is feature interoperability between multi-vendor enterprise systems – particularly for advanced SIP-controlled multimedia applications. Although SIP-based call control has a dozen or so proven features that will work across a multivendor network, some of the more advanced features like click to conference and follow-me-find-me may not work across a multivendor network.
One way to solve this problem is to use the approach Tekelec recommends. Tekelec can, at a user’s request, “turn off” the local feature control and then offer feature interoperability between multiple vendor platforms by controlling the requested features from a centralized, hosted platform. To achieve this interoperability Tekelec has created and tested configuration files that are sent to the premise-based PBX or SIP end point and are “locked in” to enable the interoperability.
When asked how to approach fully featured VoIP interoperability between wireline and wireless (mobile) users, Tekelec correctly pointed out that while interoperability is possible, it also depends on advanced capabilities of the mobile handset – a capability that most mobile handsets can’t yet offer.
Our summary: Tekelec has provided another good reason to go with hosted solutions vs. premise-based VoIP.
Next time, we’ll hear from a large enterprise customer who chose to go with a premises based VoIP system and why he might disagree with Tekelec and Sylantro.
