Microsoft is giving its hosted software business a
push in the telecommunications arena.
The Redmond, Wash.-based software vendor announced today that it is
introducing a new sandbox and sponsoring a competition for developers
interested in creating hosted VoIP
Connected Services framework and its Hosted Messaging and Collaboration suite.
Since the introduction of those frameworks last year, Microsoft has seen
significant enterprise and consumer adoption of both software-as-a-service
(SaaS)
behind in the race for IP-based telephony dollars.
The company, which announced the sandbox initiative and competition at the
ITU Telecom World 2006 conference in Hong Kong today, said it is trying to
focus on three areas of fundamental importance to its strategy in the
communications industry: service delivery, revenue-generating services and
end-user devices and screens.
The new Connected Services sandbox introduced today is designed to provide
independent software vendors, systems integrators, network equipment
providers and telecom services providers with a platform for developing and
testing Web-based services that will work in combination with traditional
telecommunications offerings.
Pieter Knook, senior vice president of the mobile and embedded devices
division at Microsoft, noted that traditional telecommunications industry
players are threatened by new Web-based businesses, and invited market
leaders to lean on Microsoft technology to respond to those new threats.
“Microsoft is uniquely positioned to provide the operating platform through
which the industry can create new services,” he said in a statement.
Michael O’Hara, general manager for the communications sector at Microsoft,
said the goal of sandbox “is to facilitate the rapid development and
market deployment of scores of new service offerings.”
O’Hara speculated that operators would “open their networks to
next-generation Web 2.0 applications that can be mashed together with
traditional services to create new connected services.”
Microsoft is joining a crowd of vendors hoping to become preferred platforms
for the telecom industry, including IBM
, Oracle
and BEA
.
Perhaps in an effort to stand out in the fray, Microsoft also announced that
it is partnering with BT to sponsor a series of design
and development competitions.
Microsoft said that contestants should create new service designs and build
functional prototypes of their new designs.
The competitions will begin in January.
The companies hope this will help them identify innovative connected
services that they can take to market. As a sponsor of the initial competitions, BT will get first dibs at testing and marketing the winning prototypes.
Other early announced participants in the developer sandbox include Bell
Canada, Nortel and Ubiquity Software.
