Cantata's IMG/MSP Speeds Application Delivery Times for Service Providers.
Recently I spoke with Peter Vescusi about Canata’s latest IMG roll out… Verison 10.3.3. As you may recall this is a pretty feature-driven release with more SIP methods, SIP and SS7 translation and load balancing allowing a single IP address to represent a farm of IMGs.
At the Communications Developer Conference a few weeks in Santa Clara, CA I had a chance to catch up with Cantata’s James Rafferty who told me the new release has been seeing positive deployment in the telecom world.
For example, service providers are thrilled to be able to do multiple ENUM registry lookups with up to four DNS servers. This is great for peering fabrics which of course explains why I frequently see James at voice peering events.
Since we were at a developer show I suppose this was the reason we got to talking about the MSP 1010 which is similar to the IMG (he calls it a sister product) but has API hooks allowing a developer to build things like transcoding under API control.
You can also write TCAP-based applications allowing lookups for LNP. You can also write a CNAM look-up for Caller-ID.
From there we discussed time to market which Jim tells me is about 90 days with the MSP and he contrasts this with developing with boards which can take 6-9 months according to James.
An interesting topic which came up again and again at the show is fax support. Many products have interoperability glitches when using T.38. Jim says their solutions work more smoothly than others. This is not surprising from the company which invented the fax board when it was Brooktrout many years ago.
As you have likely read before, the company says its products are IMS-compliant allowing you to deploy today without having to wait for standards bodies. He does mention some Interop testing and/or tweaking may be needed in some scenarios.
On the subject of IMS the company sees video streaming and gaming as a few of the areas where there is tremendous growth happening. His company also sees IVR, prepaid services and conferencing as other applications with real-world growth in the IP space.
Out discussion led us to agree that IP allows services with several disparate elements to work better with one another. To that end he sees many service provider deploying blended services which take advantage of voice, video, IM and presence.
So what’s my take? I am told as of our meeting, 55 carriers had purchased the IMG. I find this number to be impressive and it seems the company has the potential for great success with IMG/MSP sister products.
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Hi Rich,
Nice writeup. One point of clarification. The 90 day deployment cycle I referenced was for the IMG. I don't know the details on the MSP cycle, but my colleague Guy Baracassa would.
Best Regards,
James