TimesTen anticipates enhanced VoIP services

(Telephony) TimesTen Performance Software said its has signed deals to provide its software to Nuera Communications, telecom technologies inc., and Westwave Communications.

With the new wins, plus its five existing customers, TimesTen has gained about a 30% market share in a segment expected to exceed $4 billion by 2004.

TimesTen, which provides data caching and in-memory database products to the softswitch market, also said it anticipates that most of its customers are on the cusp of beginning to provide enhanced services beyond toll bypass.

“We sort of use the softswitch as the necessary precursor to enhanced services,” said Tim Shetler, vice president of marketing for TimesTen. “What’s happening is we’re seeing a fair number of deployments, and now we’re on the cusp of seeing the services component, especially the mobile services.”

How the company plays into the enhance VoIP market in the mobile environment will depend largely on the network architecture.

“The mobile services are going to look more like an Internet action that is personalized,” said Shetler. “We also think that the mobile services are going to be more data intensive.”

Regardless, the load on the database side of the network probably will remain the same, he added. At a minimum, Shetler anticipates TimesTen embedding its software into the VLR/HLR complex.

“There’s a fair amount of database dipping just to know that you have to send a message,” he said. “If there’s a transaction involved, then they go back to the database.”