TWO MORE TELECOM COMPANIES JOIN MICROSOFT FRAMEWORK

Microsoft's Communications Sector kicked open the doors to major carrier central offices recently with the success of its IPTV platforms, and last week they followed up with a Tier 1 taker for its Connected Services Framework and partnerships with two major players in both traditional and next-generation networks: Amdocs and Sylantro Systems.

“We still want to be a key IT infrastructure provider, but we also want to move into mainstream strategic relationships with service providers,” said Michael O'Hara, general manager of service provider business for Microsoft.

The unnamed carrier will deploy Microsoft's CSF to provision, manage and amalgamate multiple services. Carriers such as Bell Canada, BT and Celcom Malaysia have already deployed the technology.

O'Hara said that in the services trend, service aggregation will become the killer application and that service delivery is going to be the big technology play. However, he said the user experience with services and features such as VoIP will be what drives convergence forward.

“That's the sweet spot for us. We have put a lot of work into the connected services framework to make that happen,” O'Hara said.

Microsoft is bringing in new technology partners to help, too. Amdocs will integrate with Microsoft's CSF to help create a simplified service delivery architecture that enables the delivery of converged services.

“By expanding our integration with the Microsoft Connected Services Framework we will be able to facilitate rapid time to market and usage collection for a variety of Microsoft services, such as Hosted Messaging and Collaboration and the Microsoft TV platform,” said Mike Couture, vice president of marketing for Amdocs.

Amdocs will make its Partner Manager solution for third-party content services available on Microsoft platforms. The billing and customer relationship management provider also will collaborate with Microsoft on the development of Web services definitions for operations and business support systems.

“Working with Microsoft we plan to develop industry standard, Web services-based interfaces to facilitate cost-effective, low-risk deployment of new services,” Couture said.

Sylantro is also investigating porting some of its applications to Microsoft platforms. The company signed an agreement to jointly develop and market hosted applications through the integration of Sylantro's application feature server and Microsoft's Live Communications Server and Hosted Messaging and Collaboration service.

“The result will be integrated solutions for service providers for full telephony applications with all the collaborative applications Microsoft brings to the table,” said Bernard Gutnick, vice president of product marketing for Sylantro.

The two companies will demonstrate this week at Supercomm the first live, integrated solutions on Microsoft's real-time Office Communicator. “You will see telephony-enabled Microsoft Office applications,” Gutnick said.

Among the other plans Microsoft has for Supercomm, the software giant will have several executives speaking as part of panel sessions.