Diane Myers, director of corporate marketing at Gathersburg, Maryland-based BroadSoft, said the company formed the new 50/50 joint venture, called Netria Inc, because it detected a need among network operators for a platform for central deployment, activation, maintenance and updating of both hardphones and softphones.
She added that BroadSoft recognized the need for the platform to be independent of its own products, such that an operator can use the technology without running any BroadSoft products in its network, and for this reason had opted in favour of a joint venture with a third party developer, namely Vonair.
This is the app development arm of New York, NY-based systems and network integrator UTC Associates Inc, which has been an integration partner of BroadSoft’s since August last year. Myers said Vonair is bringing the development skills to the joint venture while BroadSoft will provide product management, marketing and sales support. Netria will be based in Gathersburg.
Myers argued that, while there are a number of client management products in the market, they were all vendor-specific, whereas the J2EE-based Netria product, when it comes to market in the Q2/Q3 time frame, will be designed to work with any leading IP phone.
To this end, it will support all major flavours for the management of SIP-compliant devices, starting with IETF, TR-O69 (the residential VoIP standard defined by the DSL Forum) and the Open Mobile Alliance, she went on.
As for more proprietary protocols such as Cisco Systems Inc’s Skinny SIP, Myers said the company is currently working out its priorities for future support. Other heterogeneous client management products from companies such as Owera and Finepoint are focused primarily on residential VoIP/consumer broadband voice deployments.
As to how the Netria software will be deployed, she said it will be available as a standalone or integrated into an operator’s IMS core, complementing the HSS module for subscriber management with a client management component.
She added that, while the partners still have to decide whether to seek standardization of the client management platform, they will work for compliance with specific IMS vendors who are already partners, such as Sweden’s LM Ericsson Telefon AB.
