customer deployments, news announcements, and industry updates and opinion

In the past, when we have spoken to operators, they have generally already gone through a process of evaluation to determine their strategic direction and the services they want to deploy. Typically, this means that they have already considered our area of expertise – services for the hosted enterprise market – and decided that they want to invest in these capabilities; the conversation they then have with Gintel is about choosing the best solution or helping to define an RFx. Recently, howe...

According to a forthcoming report from Moriana Group, the average sales cycle for IMS related products is more than a year1. Apparently, this is composed of about three months for a field trial, three months for a lab trial with the remaining six months presumably accounted for by various RFx activities. Since a wide range of vendors was surveyed, we can infer that the process is not limited to the largest Communications Service Providers (CSPs), which one might expect to have more bureaucrat...

Software as a Service (SaaS) can be defined as software that is available to rent by individuals and enterprises. Such software applications can be rented from application service providers, who may exist as entities focused exclusively on making a particular application available. Increasingly, telecoms operators and service providers are adding such capabilities to their product portfolios. The concept is nothing new – centrex has been around as a service for over 40 years – allowing custom...

As the end of March approaches, we find ourselves caught between fading memories of the MWC in Barcelona and anticipation of the IMS World Forum in Paris at the end of April. Barcelona was great – by far the most successful event for Gintel to date – but it’s interesting to consider how the hype pendulum has swung between this year and the last. For example, it was striking how the buzz surrounding IMS has quietly diminished to be replaced by that surrounding femtocells and mobile content dis...