COMMUNICASIA: Glenayre teams with End2End for active messaging

SINGAPORE--Glenayre Technologies is partnering with Europe’s largest content delivery platform provider to promote its new Viscera Active Messaging solution in hopes that End2End can offer the multimedia mailbox solution to carriers in a quick-and-easy bundle.

Glenayre unveiled Active Messaging at the 3GSM World Congress earlier this year and expects to be shipping the first commercial products in the fourth quarter. The solution is essentially a multimedia mailbox that ties the voice message box to the phones display, allowing a customer to interact visually with the voicemail and receive video messages as well as plain audio. Arch-competitor Comverse released a similar product at 3GSM also. While the services appear to be IMS-powered integrated services, they actually use the same circuit-switched channel as a standard voicemail. The graphical interface is actually a rendered image on the screen rather an actual client.

Since the announcement, however, Glenayre has been bulking up the solution, allowing carriers to use it as a direct-to-consumer content delivery platform instead of just a peer-to-peer messaging service. Glenayre Messaging vice president of product management Mark Yaphe said the vendor has integrated storefront and push-content mechanisms into the standard solution allowing carriers to tie the messaging platform into other services. For instance, Yaphe said, a mobile data service could send off a message to a customer as soon as a perspective suitor accesses his or her profile. Or a customer could sign up for a service that pushes a video clip into his or her mailbox the moment their favorite team scores a goal in the world cup, Yaphe said.

On the back-end the platform ties into a carrier’s existing infrastructure with XML feeds, allowing it to link the messaging application to any other service, he said. But Glenayre is counting on the End2End partnership to kick-start demand for the platform. Yaphe said Glenayre would provide what is essentially a template to its carrier customers for delivering content promotions and other content tie-ons, saving the carrier development time and effort.