A few days ago, I had the chance  to sit and talk with Sanjay Jhawar Senior Vice President of Marketing and Business Development at BridgePort Networks. My introduction to BridgePort came through a recent announcement around their wireless handover technology and a new USB adapter that provides GSM authentication over IP networks that turns the laptop into a GSM end point via VoIP. You can read a bit more about that in a Wireless Week article here. But that's really just a surface point of entry based on the concepts of Fixed Mobile Convergence, the marrying of VoIP and Mobile Phone service. BridgePort does much more, and Sanjay brings some fascinating ideas to the forefront of our conversation.

Sanjay's Background (from the company web site)

Sanjay Jhawar is responsible for all marketing and business development functions and is lead strategist for BridgePort Networks. Sanjay brings 14 years of high tech experience and has consistently been an industry thought leader in the mobile Internet space since 1995.

             

Prior to joining BridgePort Networks, Jhawar was Entrepreneur-in-Residence at St. Paul Venture Capital, examining new opportunities in the intersection of cellular, Wi-Fi and 3G technologies, and earlier was Vice President, Wireless at CIR Ventures in Milan, Italy.

             

His operational background includes serving as Director of Program Management in Microsoft’s Mobile Internet Business Unit. Before that, Jhawar was Vice President of Marketing and Business Development at Sendit AB, a mobile email start-up in Sweden and was instrumental in its sale to Microsoft for $128 million in July 1999. At Motorola, Jhawar was European Business Manager for smart phones, WAP Phones, GPRS terminals and SIM toolkits and co-founded the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) Forum in 1997, serving on its board.

             

Earlier, Jhawar held engineering and product planning roles at IBM’s Visual Products group. He has served on the boards mobile Internet startups: Teltier Technologies, now part of dynamicosft, Inc. and Hiugo S.p.A., now part of Acotel Group S.p.A.

             

Jhawar holds a Masters of Arts (Hons.) in Electronic Engineering from Cambridge University, UK.


A Little About BridgePort Networks
Service providers seek BridgePort Networks™ MobileVoIP solutions for quick go-to-market services for their subscribers.  BridgePort Networks solutions for MobileVoIP provide subscribers the ability to communicate seamlessly between the mobile and broadband networks, using a single number. Over time with MobileVoIP solutions subscribers will have the freedom to communicate using the device and network of their choice and communications service providers will benefit through using internet economics for mobility.

BridgePort Networks offers a software based network infrastructure solution, the NomadicONE Network Convergence Gateway (NCG), which enables the convergence of mobile and IP voice and data services. The product, sold to communications service providers, enables users to have one phone number across all devices and networks – mobile, broadband and WiFi, with all of the advantages of voice over IP, such as ubiquitous availability and lower cost. With NomadicONE NCG and emerging mobile phones that have both, mobile and WiFi modes, phone calls to mobile phone numbers are seamlessly handled as voice over IP calls when in range of a WiFi network. The NomadicONE NCG also permits low cost SIP based fixed VoIP terminals such as analog telephone adapters and desktop SIP phones to terminate calls and messages sent to mobile phone numbers.

                  

Utilizing the NomadicONE NCG, subscribers are able to make and receive calls regardless of whether they are connected to the mobile network or the IP network. Ultimately, the primary number a subscriber’s uses for voice calls, becomes their single identity for all calls.

The NomadicONE NCG drives the highest value for the lowest cost, providing superior call/session economics because it leverages all of the communication service provider’s previous investment in mobile and IP infrastructure. Communication service providers can now move beyond a triple play of voice, video and data and introduce mobility for a quad play enabling new transparent services for subscribers with seamless delivery of voice and data across any network.

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Disclaimer: I'm going to confess to a technical faux pas on my part. I recorded the conversation with Sanjay to ease writing this up. Due to technical challenges, the recording was accidentally deleted. I'm writing this up as best I can from the few notes I took and memory. Any errors here are my fault. A very frustrating turn of events.

Ken: My reader audience is a broad set of business and technical people. Most are interested in VoIP technologies. Some have deployed systems, but some are still trying to determine the best path to take. Now they're been hit with a barrage of information about something called IMS, or IP Multimedia Subsystems. Can you explain IMS in your view for readers?

Sanjay: IMS is really a broad topic, but what it represents is the convergence we've heard talk of for the past several years. Convergence takes on many forms, but the ability to merge telephone calls and data networks into single working systems is key. IMS is the key to the convergence of services and applications we've all been waiting for.

Ken: Much of what I read talks about Fixed Mobile Convergence in terms or a dual-mode or multi-mode handset. I know these are out in the market, but given the cost and availability of cellular air time, is there really a demand for a cell phone that roams across to WiFi

Sanjay: Those phones are available today and in some areas are becoming quite popular. The ability for a mobile user to move from one network to another, taking their single phone number with them is something people are really interested it. But I'd say fixed mobile convergence and IMS are much more than that. That's only a very small piece of the evolution that's underway.

What IMS really provides, when you introduce the multi-mode phone, is a way to support the users present. Which network your device is present on may determine how you want to receive the call. For example, if you're out and about you may choose to receive calls on your cell phone, but as you move about during the day, you may work in several different locations. Many people work at home in the morning, then spend part of the day in meetings, arriving at the office later in the day. We believe being able to detect and manage what network you're on provides a context defining how you want to receive calls.

I read something you wrote a while back about presence as a way of putting the user in context. I'm also a big fan of David Allen's Getting Things Done. We're talking about those sorts of solutions that put the user in context so they can work most effectively based on the tools they have. Fixed mobile convergence is really about the handoff of that single telephone number to the network context the users wants to use. When you arrive at the office, you might want to receive calls on your PC rather than your cell phone. The PC provides rich media content and the ability for voice and video collaboration, plus all the file sharing and other tools that come with the PC.

Another factor is the network. It's true that cellular minutes are cheap in some cases. But international business isn't. It makes sense to hand off call traffic to the most cost-effective network. When your devices arrives at the office and can be connected via WiFi, it makes sense to move that call off of the more expensive cellular network onto the corporate network via VoIP. Of course the cellular providers don't really like that, but it's good business.

Ken: Based on the solutions BridgePort offers, where do your offerings fit? Is there a business fit, or is IMS really something the carriers want?

Sanjay: Our customer based is clearly the cable companies and other enhanced service providers. A cable company looking to provide converged services can now integrate seamlessly with the PSTN or cellular phone networks. IMS is more about speed to delivery of new services than about the direct users' services. IMS solutions allow providers to move solutions to market more quickly and effectively.

We haven't done a lot of work directly with business enterprises. There's certainly a fit for the large enterprise that acts as its own service provider. Companies that provide their own voice and data networks are, in a sense, service providers in their own right. IMS solutions could enable them to more quickly deliver converged services, including fixed mobile convergence, to their own highly distributed work force

Ken: But the real market for IMS is the providers?

Sanjay: In many cases yes. There's a huge base of small and medium businesses around the world. These are often highly mobile knowledge workers. Their ability to use every bit of network resource, whether it's a phone call or multimedia collaboration is key to their success. For many of these businesses, partnering with a managed service provider may be the best approach to integration and fully converged networks. They already use managed phone services in some cases, and businesses use commercial carriers for their cellular service.

Whether it's existing services or newer 3G wireless technologies, the key is how users manage their presence on the net. Presence is the key to accessibility and for business people; accessibility is an important factor to success. Our solutions help deliver the kind of presence and handoff between networks that let users receive calls when and where they want to receive them. Not just on the phone, but on the phone, a PDA, a system at home, a system at the office, or somewhere remote, like a hotel room.

Giving users the easy ability to use the best tools available at the time (in the context they're working in at the moment) increases their ability to succeed. Giving users control to dictate how they'll work in these different contexts is a very powerful advancement in technology.

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Wrap up from Ken
First let me say that this was one of the most fascinating conversations I've had during my recent interviews. I'm incredibly frustrated that I lost the recording of our conversation. This post would be much longer and more detailed, but my memory and limited notes (because I was relying on the recording) are personally quite frustrating. But I'd rather share that with you and acknowledge my own errors.

BridgePort gave me a new perspective on IMS. First, I've held the notion that fixed mobile convergence was really the key component, but Sanjay seemed to play that aspect down as something that's, while not exacltly trivial, already here in many ways, and quite easy to do.

I'm not sure the availability of the multi-mode devices is widespread. I don't think we'll see huge adoption until device availability achieves critical mass. And I fear the impetus among wireless providers is to delay and downplay this effort. Whether your carrier is Verizon, T-Mobile, or whoever, I don't believe they're really anxious to provide the ability of dropping the call of their expensive cellular network to hand it off to your corporate network. Their focus is on minutes of use. That's where their revenue comes from. Fixed mobile convergence is all about moving traffic off their networks onto our own that we manage. I expect resistance, but couched in wording that would sound like they support the effort.

The large carriers, wired and wireless, have remained focused on cost rather than convergence. I'd argue that the voice services we see today, in most cases, are mostly glorified dial tone. True, converged, IP unified communications services aren't coming from the major carriers. They're coming from companies like BridgePort Networks, iotum, SightSpeed, Sangoma Technologies, and TelEvolution. Historically, innovation comes from small, nimble companies with incredible vision.

One of the really visible facets of VoIP the past year, especially with the success of open source tools like Asterisk, is the dramatically reduced barrier to entry. VoIP service providers can now build a business model to serve a market segment and very quickly deploy VoIP services. The niche players and small innovators are where real service convergence is happening. BridgePort, in my view, provides an incredibly powerful enabling technology. It enables VoIP service providers to step up to IMS, service integration and providing not just VoIP, but truly integrated unified communications systems.

There's another aspect of this technology evolution that's less visible. Convergence means something different to everyone. Service convergence might mean delivering voice and data networks over the same infrastructure. It might also mean combining voice at data at the application layer, strengthening business tools for customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management, and business operations. After talking with Sanjay, I feel there's another aspect on the horizon that we all know about, but often overlook - device convergence.

IMS coupled with fixed mobile convergence quietly herald the reality that the next generation will be device agnostic. It won't matter whether you're using a cell phone, a PDA, a computer, or some other device. And the computer OS becomes irrelevant as well. This step allows the network to give you access to all the resources your device of the moment is capable of supporting. The network doesn't need to care what the device is because IMS enables support for all of them, and seamless handoff among a multitude of tools.

I'll be doing some more reviews, interviews and write-ups of IMS and the emerging unified communications trends. Both the real trends and the theoretical ones. Talking to Sanjay reinforced my own belief that VoIP is a bridge technology on the path to convergence. VoIP gives us a glimmer of the power a fully integrated multimedia network brings to business. In sales parlance, there's a green field of opportunity for some pretty exciting advances ahead.

If you find these interviews useful or helpful, or there's someone in particular (either an individual or a company) that you'd like to read or hear an interview with, please drop me a note.

For archival and reference purposes, a PDF copy of this interview write-up will also be available in the Realtime VoIP Community Reading Room.

Technorati Tags: BridgePort Networks, Sanjay Jhawar , IMS, IP Multimedia Subsystems, VoIP, fixed mobile convergence