What Does Cistera Do?

To start with what we do, I am going to start with what we don't do, and that is we don't provide PBX functionality for enterprises. That we leave to companies like Cisco and Nortel to provide. They provide the ability to allow calls to be connected together and the ability to call to the outside world, and look after things like dial plan, that is the management of numbers internally, that is extension, phones and what we call trunks. Trunks are connections to the outside world or to other PBX systems.

Telephony Applications

Telephony applications are a set of functions that live next to or on top of the PBX system. The most common are Voicemail, Conferencing, Call Distribution (those annoying things that answer the phone and redirect for you). These are in most systems above 20 or so so phones all the way up to 100,000s of phones.

The market at a very high level that we live in is this, the Market to deliver Telephony Applications to the Enterprise Voice Market. This is a very big market and the size is explored in another article, but overall is in the $US Billions of dollars each year is spent on expanding functionality of a basis phone system.

Voicemail is an example of a telephony application

Conferencing and Voicemail are probably the two biggest individual functions in terms of dollars spent. These systems are usually provided by the manufacturers of the PBX but increasingly these are being provided by third parties that have different and unique ways of providing this functionality. Examples of these are Unity from Cisco, Meridian from Nortel and Octal from Avaya.

Conference is an example of telephony application

Conference is another example of a Telephony Application that is very popular. There are three distinct markets for conference. First is simple conference and meetme capability that is provided in the PBX to provide limited functionality. Second is Conference Bridges. These are standalone hardware/software solutions that provide more comprehensive functionality such as much larger conferences, scheduling etc.

The third are collaboration conference bridges. These are conference bridges that integrate into other systems. They have support for application sharing, webcasting, video support and others. Here companies like Polycom dominate because of their experience in this market. Cisco has Meeting Place and a new comer Microsoft has Live Communications Server. There is the market leader of online hosted systems and that is Webex.

Verizon Market Sizing

Here is an example of a published market sizing from Verizon for the IP Telephony Applications.

So what does Cistera Networks do?

What we saw is that the market for these types of tools is growing, but not in the traditional ways. We are seeing more and more the need to provide these types of functionality (which we provide above and more), in a more cohensive fashion.

They fall into three of categories:

• Event Alerting and Notification
• Quality Assurance and Compliance
• Presence, Productivity and Collaboration

More and more companies are looking to solve 3 or more of these issues at the same time. The problem is that if you want to do this to large populations of users, then if you do not have an administration and management strategy, then they are difficult if not impossible to implement.

This is where you turn to an Enterprise platform for the delivery of these applications. We provide the platform and the core applications needed to roll out a large scale implementations.