In talking with some of the sales team at Iperia, I’ve heard that they’ve gotten feedback from folks suggesting that service creation may be more powerful that what some departmental managers see as their immediate need.

That’s where IperiaVX’s rapid application development comes into play, as well as its standards-based, “plays well with others” nature. In this podcast, Iperia Sales Engineer Scott Chong (I’ll let him explain the term “Sales Engineer”) talks about the benefits of application development for departmental solutions, and how IT doesn’t have to get hung out to dry in the process.

 

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You’d probably have to be living under a rock not to have seen Microsoft’s VoIP As You Are campaign, pitching unified communications on MS Exchange Server. Maybe you even saw the Unified Communications Launch back in October. (You can catch a sample on YouTube.)

It’s darned impressive, and they’re touting it like it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread. I guess it takes someone big like the Redmond folks to bring this to the masses, but it creates a bit of mixed emotions, knowing that Iperia’s been this space for quite a while now.

This isn’t a sour grapes thing for me - Iperia’s not the only company on the block with UC software in its product mix, and it’s not like UC was invented at Iperia’s Billerica headquarters.

In fact, it’s quite the opposite. It’s a pat on the back for a ten-year-old industry in general, and for the companies in particular that broke new technological ground.

And there’s still more to be done. As Gartner notes:

The UC market and its technologies are maturing, but, overall, the market remains at an early stage of maturity, and the adoption of converged solutions remains slow.

After ten years, and with Redmond in the arena, however, something’s gotta give. I, for one, am glad Iperia’s moved beyond just UC applications to full-blown service creation. Sure, applications that tie into the communications infrastructure will always be necessary. But being able to customize solutions on the fly will make it that much easier to stay ahead of Microsoft on the development curve.

…allow me to share in the meantime. Iperia’s working with Chariton Valley, a local exchange company providing state-of-the-art telecommunications services to businesses and residents in Northeast Missouri, to create revenue generation opportunities and improve customer retention with IperiaVX.

According to Jim Simon, Chariton Valley’s General Manager:

“We needed our service creation platform to have the ability to interoperate with multiple switch vendors, and to work in both a wireless and wireline messaging environment. IperiaVX delivered on those requirements, with quick and easy installation as well as great customer support.”

They’ve been in business for more than 56 years, and you don’t stay in business that long - especially as a local  exchange carrier - without innovating. They’re leading their state (and are pretty far ahead nationally, as well) by offering the benefits of a fiber optic network to their businesses and residential customers.

Now, they’re innovating their service offerings with IperiaVX, much to the delight of Iperia’s Chris Poer:

“It’s a pleasure to work with forward-thinking companies like Chariton Valley. They understand that in today’s service provider industry, you need to offer features and services tailored for specific niches within your market.

“That way, you stand apart from your competition, creating added value for which you can charge a premium price, and reduce customer churn at the same time. Otherwise, your service becomes commoditized, and your margins drop as you spend more and more to acquire and retain your customers.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

You have have seen the news on Reuters, TMC, or MSNBC, but in case not, it’s official: IperiaVX has been certified “HiPath Ready (U.S.)” on the Siemens HiPath 8000 Platform.

For us, this is a pretty big deal, because as Iperia Enterprise VP Josh Veshia notes:

“Many of the largest enterprises and service providers in North America rely on Siemens and the strength of their IP solutions … IperiaVX is the first Service Creation platform to successfully complete HiPath 8000 certification. This certification enables Siemens and Iperia to offer a unique value proposition to their customers: The ability to deliver high-margin, high-value communications services for their employees, partners, and clients.

These services, whose time to market used to take a year or more, can now be designed, created, tested, and deployed in just a few months with the IperiaVX Service Creation Platform.”

Though getting a certification like this one is a team effort, I’d like to flag three folks who really brought it all together: Bernd Weimar and Chuck Brooks at Siemens, and Gary Raches at Iperia. These three joined together in the Siemens lab and played a vital role in Iperia’s HiPath 8000 certification.

We’re grateful to these three guys, their teams, and to Siemens Communications in general. Now that it’s all said and done, it looks like the certification process could be the beginning of a great working relationship together.

Mae Kowalke, an Associate Editor at TMC.net who also blogs for them on Wireless Mobility, posted this item last week in the IP Telephony Online Community section, about VoIP Logic making its Web Services APIs available to service providers. Her article caught my attention because of this paragraph:

Further, VoIP Logic’s APIs enable a variety of ways to access and make use of information from third-party vendor subsystems from companies like Sylantro, High Deal and Iperia.

Exposing APIs as Web Services is also key to the success of IperiaVX - that’s what makes it easy for web developers to tightly couple voice with internal and third-party applications, without having to dig around in the telecom infrastructure.

(Thanks, Mae, for dropping us a nod.)

More than a year ago, I helped Iperia with one of its first demos of the then-under-development service creation platform IperiaVX. The demo was for a “trader desktop” - an integration of voice and data functions in a portal for a hypothetical financial broker.

One of the examples in the demo was a stock watch situation. Using IperiaVX, the trader could quickly see when a stock fell below a pre-defined alert level, and a list of her clients with holdings in that stock. As a result, the trader could record a single voice broadcast about the situation, and with a few clicks, send the message out to all the relevant clients with instructions on how to take action - sell it off, buy it for the dollar-cost averaging, etc.

Now, just expand that to the scale of a multi-billion-dollar financial services firm - like Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, or Bear Stearns, for example. How happy would their clients be to get that kind of rapid information? And how much in trading commissions would that generate?

Especially on a day like today, when the stock market is diving, having a service like this to offer isn’t just good in the short term. It’s a competitive advantage.

So my mind snapped to that demo this morning, and a lot’s changed since I wrote and recorded the voiceover track for that old trader desktop. But the potential to help traders and their clients react fast to market moves - that opportunity still exists.

Los Angeles, CA, Internet Telephony Expo, September 11, 2007  —— Iperia, Inc., a leading provider of customer-proven unified communication platforms to the service provider industry, today announced that Nuvio Corporation, a leading provider of VoIP solutions, has selected Iperia’s VX platform as the foundation for their next generation Unified Communications-based services.

IperiaVX is a revolutionary service-creation platform that enables seamless integration of new and existing communications applications into a single, voice-enabled solution. IperiaVX leverages standards-based portlet technology (JSR168), SIP Servlet technology (JSR116) and service oriented architecture (SOA) design principles. These standards allow service providers to quickly create new voice-based solutions that can provide a differentiated service to a target enterprise vertical market.

“Iperia’s experience providing Unified Communications applications to the carrier market coupled with the unique service creation capability of VX will allow us to quickly expand our IP hosted solutions strategy and enable our business users with advanced communication requirements to increase productivity,” said Jason Talley, Chief Executive Office for Nuvio Corporation.

“Iperia’s VX platform provides user-friendly Unified Messaging applications for residential as well as the business market,” said Chris Poer, VP Sales for Iperia. “As a VoIP technology leader, Nuvio has a deep understanding of this technology and is perfectly suited to leverage the tools contained in the VX platform to provide advanced communications services to their clients.”

About Iperia
Iperia is the emerging leader in service creation platform technology, serving both service providers (wireline, wireless, and broadband) and enterprise companies worldwide. Iperia’s Enterprise platform IperiaVX allows the integration of new and existing applications into a voice-enabled framework. Iperia offers a suite of “best in class” applications plus an open architecture that provides interoperability with shared resources and systems. This combination brings new efficiency and ease of use to personal and business communications. Iperia is privately held and funded by Friedli Corporate Finance, a leading Swiss venture firm. Its headquarters are in North Billerica, Massachusetts. For more information, visit www.iperia.com.

Contact
Chris Poer, VP Sales and Marketing
Direct: 336 656-0888
Fax: 978 437 3536
Email: cpoer@iperia.com

About Nuvio Corporation
Nuvio Corporation, a provider of business communication solutions, distributes its products through direct, indirect and wholesale channels. Nuvio offers a reliable, stable communications platform providing unparalleled uptime for customers. Since 2003, Nuvio has provided PBX services for small to medium-sized businesses in a cost-effective manner. For more information, visit www.nuvio.com.

Contact
Joe Woodbury, Director of Marketing
Office: 816-444-4422 ext 5853
Mobile: 913-634-9934
Email: jwoodbury@nuvio.com

Nuvio product names and the Nuvio logo are trademarks of Nuvio Corporation.

It hit the wire services this morning, and everyone at Iperia is celebrating. After tens of thousands of hours in development and testing, and thanks to the efforts of so many dedicated people (and not to mention the critical role our ActivEdge software played in the story), here’s the big news:

Iperia has partnered with industry leaders IBM® and BEA™ to leverage the technology and security of their application and SIP servers, making IperiaVX compatible with the majority of portal technologies available today. The platform is currently deployed at select customer locations and is generally available. For additional information please contact sales@iperia.com.

Big difference between working demos, select deployments, and general availability, let me tell you. Iperia is now poised to bring even greater value to the service provider and enterprise markets, and help them tightly couple voice with mission-critical applications.

It’s the next wave in business process efficiency, and considering the level of interest we’ve encountered in 2006 and 2007, we’re thrilled to make it available to a wider audience.

…series of overviews, spec sheets, and white papers!

Well, maybe that wasn’t the answer you were expecting. But in the case of IperiaVX, which is going into GA next week, we’re proud to announce the release of a few new documents that reveal the deal behind IperiaVX.

For service providers, go here to learn more and get access to the new white paper, “7 Unique, High-ROI Services You Can Launch in Less Than One Month With IperiaVX.” For enterprises, this is your ticket to learning more about IperiaVX and examples of how IperiaVX brings great business efficiency, lower costs, and greater revenue potential to your business.

If you’re into application servers, you know who the two biggest players are - BEA and IBM. They control the lion’s share of the application server market, and if you want to reach the enterprises they serve, it makes a lot of sense to ensure your product plays nicely with theirs.

So in planning, designing, and programming IperiaVX, the team pulled together to develop a service creation platform that integrates seamlessly with both IBM’s WebSphere application server and SIP server as well as BEA’s WebLogic application server and SIP server.

The announcement of an agreement with BEA happened first, in April 2006. At the time, Mike McHugh, vice president and general manager of BEA WebLogic Communications Platform, had this to say:

“In today’s competitive telecom market, network operators require new and flexible communications infrastructure software that can enable them to quickly create and launch new services. We see the integration of BEA WebLogic SIP Server with Iperia’s standards-based approach … as a fundamental key to providing an adaptable solution that service providers can offer for real differentiation; we are pleased to partner with them in this effort.”

Then, in December 2006, Iperia made it official with IBM as well. Less than one year after being hired to guide the evolution of Iperia from unified communications to service creation platforms, Iperia CEO David Jodoin said:

“Our technical collaboration with IBM will enable Iperia to provide our customers with real, sustainable value. Equally important, it affords us – and our customers – the knowledge that the WebSphere platform is a proven middleware software and development platform for which many of our customers are already familiar.”

With IBM and BEA on board, and test implementations well under way, the momentum toward 6/26/07 began to pick up. Next up - putting together more information about IperiaVX, and explaining just what it could do for service providers and enterprise clients.