Microsoft Sandbox

Rinku Tyagi

HONG KONG: Despite the tremendous growth seen by the telecommunications industry, it still lacks a unified approach towards making it easily accessible to the consumer or the end user.

And Microsoft Corporation is taking this as an opportunity and ITU 2006 as the platform to announce its new solutions, alliances and programs designed and dedicated to facilitate innovation, service delivery and revenue-generating services in the Telecommunications industry.

An important development in this space was the Microsoft announcing an exclusive tie up with VSNL International. This partnership will combine the strengths of both organizations—Microsoft’s expertise in providing IT solutions and VSNL’s skills at connectivity and networking.

John Hayduk, CTO, VSNL International, while making the announcement, said that this powerful combination of MS and VSNL will surely help realize the dream of unified communications and make it easy for the end user to be able to use their services as one package.

The applications and services that are a part of this tie up will become operational early next year, when they announce more developments on this. These services would be targeted primarily at the small and mid-sized businesses, who want to go the managed IT services way, and let a third party to take complete control from development of the solution through delivery to its post implementation management.

The company also launched Connected Services Sandbox as an initiative aimed at creating an ecosystem for integrating telecom services offered by ISVs (Independent Software Vendors), developers, system integrators, NEPs (Network Equipment Providers) and telecommunications service providers.

Sandbox combines Web services with telecom offerings, thus, creating managed network mash-ups, which can then be offered through the Software as a Service (SaaS). As a result, any type of network or service can be used to deliver the service.

Initially, it plans to offer multiple Microsoft products and solutions like Microsoft Connected Services Framework, Microsoft Solution for Hosted Messaging and Collaboration, Microsoft Solution for Windows®-based Hosting and Microsoft Customer Care Framework.

Many industry leaders like British Telecom, Bell Canada, Nortel and Tech Mahindra have already signed in, while talks are on with many others.

As a part of the community, the participants of the Connected Services Sandbox get early exposure to Microsoft products and solutions, can give their feedback to MS about their offerings, and the developers get access to trained Microsoft developers, designers and architects.

Not only this, there would also be increased business opportunities within the partners. This way you can get good business within and outside the network of partners while MS takes up the task of promotion and awareness about the service.

©CyberMedia News