Sylantro chief exec appointment all about growth

Sylantro Systems positioned itself for continued growth today by naming Marco Limena as president and CEO. Limena was the vice president of Hewlett-Packard’s network and service provider solution business before joining Sylantro. Current CEO Pete Bonee will serve as chairmen of the company.

Limena brings and added dimension of international management experience to Sylantro, which is already a global company, as well as experience running large businesses. As head of HP's SPBU, Limena was responsible for all strategic initiatives, industry solutions and partner relationships for the communications group throughout North America, Europe and Asia.

He started with HP in Italy in 1992 and also contributed to the HP office of strategy and technology for key corporate initiatives including mobility and digital media. Limena led the team that combined the telecommunication organizations and products from HP, Compaq, Digital Equipment and Tandem into a new business unit.

Bonee said Limena will lead Sylantro through its next stage of high growth and global expansion. “The company has been growing. We’re expanding worldwide, but we decided to bring in Marco as a leader who has experience running a global company through high growth phases and could take the business to the next level,” Bonee said.

Sylantro’s Synergy application feature platform is deployed with Tier 1 wireline, wireless, and cable providers as well as Internet companies such as SunRocket. Its customer list includes AT&T, Bandwidth.com, China Netcom, China Unicom, Covad, One IP Voice, Qwest, Starhub and Swisscom.

Important to Sylantro’s current and future growth strategy are its partnerships, which include: Alcatel, IBM, Microsoft, Motorola, Siemens, Sonus and others.

“I spoke with several of Sylantro’s customers and partners and found them to be highly appreciative of what Sylantro brings to the market today and their ability to continue to innovate,” Limena said. “It will be interesting to see what other big names we can add to that partnership list.”

Sylantro recently became the only application feature server company integrated into Microsoft’s EVS (enhanced VoIP solution).

Limena said there will be no immediate change in strategy, but that the opportunity for Sylantro is growth. “Sylantro is a unique company in the ecosystem. We have been successful with some of the largest service providers in the world, but also in the incumbent and emerging markets. So compared to the other players in this industry, I believe that Sylantro’s relationships and experience put it in the best position for growth,” he said.

So does its IMS approach, Bonee said. “No one vendor in this world of open interfaces and the evolution to IMS provides everything end to end, so our application feature server is always combined with other network elements to provide that end-to-end. We are at the boundary between all the traditional voice infrastructure and all the other things available from the Internet. That’s the most exciting part of the value chain in the IMS model,” he said.

Limena said that is why Sylantro partners with companies such as Microsoft. He said the company will have several announcements soon in that area and in the area of WiMAX where it currently has the largest application server deployment.