HP's 5 hot spots for OpenCall partners

KUALA LUMPUR: The world's second largest PC maker and printer giant, Hewlett Packard has identified five key areas to build its partner base of ISVs (independent solutions vendors). These areas are Instant Group Communications such as `push to talk' and 'instant messaging services', Next Generation Messaging and Multimedia such as `premium messaging' and `spam control applications', Infotainment, Charging and Billing Solutions and Signaling Platform solutions. This was shared by Steve Dietch, Worldwide Director, Marketing, HP OpenCall Business Unit with the media at their OpenCall Insight Days — their annual OpenCall ISV partners event - in Kuala Lumpur.

Delivering the welcome address to over 100 partners and telco customers who are participating in this two day event, Peter van der Fluit, VP Sales and Marketing, for Software Global Business Unit, once again emphasized the need for operators to focus on synchronizing IT in their business. According to Nitin Bhagwatkar, OpenCall Partner Manager for India, "Service providers are tapping into new opportunities like custom greeting and ring tones, information acquisition, customer support, voice mail and mass alert applications, the role of software and IT in any telecom network is just going up." HP claims that its OpenCall platform is currently being used by 40 of the world's top 50 telecom operators.

In the sidelines of the conference some of the partner ISVs are also displaying their solutions. From India, XIUS, which has some unique telecom applications which it, is now marketing worldwide through HP, was also participating. Others displaying their solutions included FeelingK of Korea, InfraValley also from Korea, NGC of Malaysia, CBOSS from Russia, Anam from Malaysia, and Yomi from Finland. Over 13 new applications built around OpenCall platform, have been announced by the partners in the last one-year.

GV Kumar, MD and CEO of Xius said, "I am very happy. We have got the leading operators from the Asia Pacific region here." These partnerships are helping companies like Xius, and they are getting a global reach, which is very crucial as Indian service providers are taking long time evaluating and deliberating over which solutions should they go for. Similarly Indian markets open up for companies like InfraValley and Yomi, both of whom are trying to break into the Indian marketplace piggybacking HP relationships.

While in India there are not too many telecom ISV partners that HP has for telecom solutions, Dietch stressed that both India and China is going to be a big focus for them, and therefore one should expect more partners coming from these regions. He however maintained they would also not want to have too many partners.