Comverse Acquires Solaiemes to Broaden its Digital Services Portfolio.

Acquisition Further Enhances Comverse’s Value Proposition to Service Providers Seeking to Evolve to Digital Lifestyle Players through RCS, WebRTC and Monetization

Key Takeaways:

• Accelerates Comverse’s Digital Services Portfolio with elements such as WebRTC Gateway, and the Industry’s first GSMA accredited RCS API Gateway
• Expands engineering expertise and talent in the IP Messaging and Digital Services Domains
• Makes Comverse’s Evolved Communication Suite the most comprehensive Digital Services offering in the Industry

WAKEFIELD, Mass., August 5, 2014 – Comverse (NASDAQ: CNSI), a global leader in telecom and enterprise business enablement, announced today its acquisition of Spain-based Solaiemes, an innovator focused on enabling the creation and monetization of Service Providers’ (SPs) digital services.

Solutions from Solaiemes complement the market leading Evolved Communication Suite (ECS) offering from Comverse, and the combined portfolio creates an end-to-end platform for service monetization of IP based digital services.

Quotes:
“Unlike other players in the digital economy, Comverse is unique in its product offering that enables SPs to both deliver and monetize digital experiences.” said Aashu Virmani, VP Product Management and Product Marketing of Digital Services at Comverse. “Solaiemes’ technology strengthens Comverse’s Evolved Communication Suite (ECS) portfolio, which enables SPs to become digital lifestyle players by easily and quickly launching innovative digital services with means to monetize them.”


Supporting Facts:

• Comverse ECS offering won TMC’s 2014 “Product of the Year” award, and the 2014 COMET Innovation award.
• Solaiemes’ RCS API solution has won the GSMA RCS Innovation Award, and is the only GSMA accredited RCS API product certified with Joyn Blackbird.
• The combined products are currently in trials at several Tier-1 service providers.
• You can learn more about Comverse’s Evolved Communication Suite here.
• By 2016, the number of devices supporting WebRTC is expected to exceed 4 billion.
• Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The company does not expect the transaction to have a material impact on revenue or profitability for the quarter or fiscal year.

About Comverse
Comverse is a leading global provider of telecom business solutions that enable communication service provider success in the hyper-connected world through service innovation and smart monetization. The company’s proven and innovative product portfolio includes BSS, Policy Management (PCRF) and Enforcement, and Digital Services – all backed by Managed and Professional Services. Comverse’s extensive customer base spans more than 125 countries with solutions successfully delivered to over 450 communication service providers serving more than two billion subscribers. Comverse’s solutions are available in a variety of delivery models, including on-site, cloud, hosted/SaaS and managed services. For more information, visit www.comverse.com.

Statements included or incorporated by reference in this press release may contain “forward-looking statements.” There can be no assurance that any forward-looking statements will be achieved, and actual results could differ materially from forecasts and estimates. Important factors that could affect the company include the risks described in the section entitled “Forward-Looking Statements” Item 1A, “Risk Factors” and elsewhere in the company’s Annual Report on Form 10-K filed with the SEC on April 16, 2014 or in subsequently filed periodic, current or other reports. The company undertakes no commitment to update or revise forward-looking statements except as required by law.

TadHack 2014 in Madrid summary. Telco APIs matter.

Solaiemes sponsored TadHack 2014 event. Our company product is about telco APIs, and it was "the event". It took place in Madrid the past weekend and among the developer resources we offered RCS API Developer Portal & a WebRTC SDK to be used with Nexmo lines.

It was incredible how several satellite events provided very good entries, and how in 2 days onsite developers coming from different countries coded their hacks.

It was a pity that not many telcos sent people to see "where the money will be" but we are sure next year they will be. Thanks to all the telcos present. We could have good chats and also other tech vendors providing complementary APIs. And thanks to the brave developers who used our RCS API, they are the ones that could be named pioneers :-)

We are sure soon Alan Quayle will be postint his own summary with all the details, the decks used and pointers to the hacks.

Also, we were interviewed briefly about the reasons to participate in TadHack and why the telco APIs will be key.

You can find more pics (until the official gallery will be published by TadHack) in our Facebook Page here.
Hope to be next year at TadHack 2015

TadHack Fuenlabrada satellite event summary.

Solaiemes has partnered with Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (a public university in Madrid) to setup a Telco API workshop for Telecommunications and Computer Science students, as academic extracurricular activity, in the context of TADHack 2014.

The event aimed to give a glimpse into the fascinating world of APIs in general, and Telco APIs in particular, and setup very simple examples using some of the resources available as part of TADHack 2014.
The seminar was very brief, 6 hours in 2 days, it is hard to cover such a broad field, but we indeed tried. A step by step explanation of a RCS-base simple messaging service and deploying a WebRTC dialer application in just a few minutes was part of the seminar. We hope the students got a firm grasp of the importance of telco-related services and APIs, both as a very dynamic technology arena and a potential professional focus for their upcoming entrepreneurial projects or job seeking plans.

Thanks to Pedro de las Heras (@pheras) from the URJC TIC department to help setting this up and to Alan Quayle for their encouraging opening remarks to the event.

Additional pics from the event in our Facebook Page photo album

TadHack WebRTC exposure for Nexmo VoIP lines

As you know Solaiemes is sponsoring TadHack event and providing the RCS API portal to allow developers to get familiar with rich chat possibilities to create valuable interactive services.

As Nexmo is offering its VoIP lines for the hackaton we just prepared a "beta" way to use their lines with WebRTC. In this site the developer can introduce the credentials of the Nexmo lines and get the credentials to use that line with the WebRTC SDK. No need additional registration, if you registered in the Nexmo portal you only need to get your WebRTC SDK credentials linked to your line.

There are included a couple of examples including the code source that can be downloaded, a dialer and a clic2call.

We will keep it live for the Hackaton.

Enjoy the hack!

join TADHACK and use our RCS API to create compelling cases based on rich messaging.

Solaiemes is sponsoring TADHACK 2014 - Telecom Application Developer Hackaton (organized by Alan Quayle) to be held in Madrid next June 6-7, and providing the RCS network API to engage telco developers in starting to use rich messaging to create compelling cases, application to person (A2P/B2C) and also why not person to thing (M2P). Also developers can create use cases combining several telco APIs offered for the Hackaton including voice, sms, and related features by Telestax, Nexmo, Tropo and hSenid.

The TADHACK hackaton is offering several prizes ($) and it is open to remote entries not only onsite participants.

You may register at our  RCS API Portal Sandbox (http://tadhackrcs.solaiemes.com/) powered by 3scale API management and including a testbed to test your cases. For this event we offered the simplest REST API for RCS, including features as chat, file transfer, location and real time notifications (delivered, displayed). The portal included all the API documentation and examples. Also a simple "echo service" can be used as base to start with, find it here in Github.

The 7 minutes videotutorial



Eager to see your entries !!!

Solaiemes shortlisted for an IMS Industry Awards 2014 in the RCS Package category.

We're delighted to announce that we have been shortlisted for an #IMS Industry Awards 2014!

The winners will be announced during the IMS World Forum 2014 next week.

We compete in the Best RCS Package with our RCS Monetization Suite package that includes RCS network API and related monetizable tools that telcos can trial with an unbeatable offering.

For us it is very rewarding to be be competing with public companies and VC backed companies and cross the finger that this could open doors for growth, new customers, partnerships and investors.

Also, Solaiemes will participate and showcase demos in the WebRTC preconference Workshop showcasing how telcos can monetize WebRTC, both, exposing as web its voice, and also using WebRTC to create a myriad of innovative services combining web and telco.

Solaiemes, IMS technology partner of Project Clearwater

Solaiemes joined the Project Clearwater ecosystem as IMS Technology Partner.
Clearwater is IMS in the Cloud, a project sponsored by Metaswitch Networks.

We think Clearwater is a very good way to introduce IMS for telcos, decreasing both, complexity and cost, It worth to add value with VAS platforms from the ecosystem.

For us, it is great to become partners among a list of impressive telco technology companies as Telestax (we are Telestax partners also http://www.telestax.com/solaiemes-joins-telestax-partner-ecosystem), BroadForward, Metaswitch and cloud and virtualization companies as AWS (Amazon) and VMware.

IMS is not about a technology itself, it is about a way for telcos to create easily new IP based services and add value to their enablers. IMS is taking off finally but need options to be adopted by all telcos, not only the incumbent ones, and virtualized environments fill that gap. Application layer and VAS platforms may follow that path, and Solaiemes does.

We have tested our RCS API Gateway and our WebRTC-Telco Gateway and we can say that both are plug&play deployable on top of Clearwater IMS. Never telcos had so easy way to explore their future.

Stop talking, start playing the game. Solaiemes RCS Monetization Suite trial unbeatable offer.

Messaging is a hot space and, late but finally happened, telcos are realizing about the risk of becoming the feared "just pipe" if they leave the communication services space.

Amazing OTT apps made mandatory to offer person to person multimedia messaging for free and telcos need to offer a compelling messaging and at the same time discover how to monetize fairly the service.

It's OK, Solaiemes was working almost 4 years to prepare this moment, we build not only the pioneer and most innovative RCS network API but also additional monetization elements as the Developer Portal, RCS Store and RCS Ad Server to innovate in mobile advertising using chat based context "non-push". All our infrastructure can be cloud based and connected easily to whatever RCS core solution. As it makes no sense to launch or be testing RCS in a lab without exploring user engagement VAS and monetization capabilities we would like to present our offering to telcos:

6 Months of hosted Solaiemes Monetization Suite infrastructure including:

- RCS Network API Gateway
- RCS Developer Portal using 3Scale as API Manager
- RCS Store
- RCS Ad Server
- RCS Web/FirefoxOS client based on network API.
- 250 engineering hours for support, training, or creating API based B2C proof of concepts at your request.

TOTAL PRICE: 49.000 € 
& the amount will be discounted if you decide to go ahead and deploy commercially our products in the first licensing PO.

FAQs:

1. Why? Because of it is better to touch the things than just talk about, to build the future you have to touch the pieces as sooner the better.
2. As a telco I would like the trials for free... We understand and would like to do in that way but we have to eat every day, we are not based in the VC paradises and technology for telcos is not their preferred area either :-(. At the same time we think that is a better offering that paying twice or more just to get 50 pages advice from strategic management firms.
3. Can be customized the package with requirements as needing onsite stayings? Yes, let's talk.
4. Is the Solaiemes network API deployed in some telcos? Yes, in 4 tier-1 we can not disclose yet they have our RCS API GW and also the GSMA joyn/RCS innovation accelerator environment for developers is powered with our solutions.
5. What changes are needed in my network to use this trial? Nothing, we only need the RCS or IMS users/pwd and access to IP address of your SBC, the same than configuing device clients.
6. Is it useful without RCS launched commercially and without external develepers? Yes, as you can engage the internal telco geeks to create A2P cases to make the launch more exciting and showing that RCS opened with API is beyond alternative messaging apps regarding use feasible use cases to delight the users.
7. I am not a telco but a complementary technology provider, can we used the trial to create cases to bid jointly in the future to our customer based? Yes, let's talk.
8. As telco I am starting to select RCS core, but we are interested in defining business model and prepare in advance some B2C cases as our own Customer Care based on RCS, can be used the trial without a core? Yes. We can provide a e2e testbed based on Kamailio (the only features you will be missing are group chat and store&forward).

The successful boat is about to sail, come on board !!!

email us at: info (at) solaiemes.com

RCS Monetization Suite

In the past months we have been unveiling additional platforms on top of our pioneering RCS network API GW.

It is time to explain why API itself is not enough in the telco industry today.

We have been talking with many telcos about the possibilities of the API, and they believed in the value, but they think they need huge base of users first. That will not happen if they focus in the person to person messaging where the incumbents today are OTT. We needed to unblock this egg-chicken scenario.

Well, in the last months we have been developing the complementary pieces to the RCS API exposure to move from telco internal trials/PoCs to something they can "sell" to both, enterprise and long-tail developers, engage the final users and the magic world...MONETIZE.

To expose easily the API developers are not keen to call account managers, sign paper contracts, etc...they want a Twilio or Tropo alike portal...and we just used a tier-1 API Management company, 3Scale to offer a RCS Developer Portal cloud based that whatever telco can launch quickly.

As a new way to access to services is born, the rich-chat based interactive cases, it would be needed a way to discover new "chat services" and add to your phonebook, the market of "RCS based cases", and we developed the RCS Store framework to make feasible the "RCS service market" , as standalone app or with API to integrate with RCS clients.

Finally we may talk about money, the well-know sentence "show me the money". Yes, telcos pay a good money to strategy consultants but ask the tech vendors about how to make money :-)

Enabling high rates of API concurrence for B2C is a revenue model with enterprise, but in the other hand, to get adoption telcos need to enrich RCS with casual chat based cases created by developers. How to reward them? Well, in the same way that internet companies are overlapping the telco space and revenue sources, telcos can overlap internet space and their traditional revenue sources as advertisement. Chat based services, person-to-information, person-to-chat-based-game become a new media, providing a context where inserting contextual non-push ads...Yes, the Google model applied to instant messaging. Voilà!, our RCS Advertising Platform fills the gap.

Does it makes sense, doesn't it? Then, bundling all the pieces of the puzzle is what we named as RCS Monetization Suite.

#MWC14 or how RCS is happening without a name.

After the hectic week of #MWC14 and the also hectic post Mobile World Congress week with urgent follow-up's, it's time now to explain our views.

For Solaiemes it was the best MWC ever, more visitors, many meetings with C-level people of telcos and leading vendors, and a lot of unexpected visitors that already knew about our portfolio and interested in include our vision and related portfolio in their future strategy. We can say proudly that had visitors from the 5 continents :-)

This year GSMA did not reserve an specific RCS or joyn area. The RCS acronym is included in the Future Communication space and the commercial brand, joyn, is quietly being removed. Only in a few pods in the Connected City and Future Communication areas RCS use cases were demoed. Does it mean that RCS is being discarded? NO, just the opposite, a lot of telcos are issuing RFP's, and talked openly about plans with us. RCS will happen as messaging evolution, perhaps it does not need new names but providing new experiences and associated use cased based on messaging. Just our vision. Some of the people we talk with expressed our same opinion, we need our own messaging, and SMS is not enough today. It seems that RCS is now in the scope of enlightenment.

Also, we received many visitors interested in how WebRTC can be used by telcos, not only to expose their legacy enablers as voice but to create a myriad of new services. We returned with the batteries full of charge to walk the extra-mile and help to change the telco industry :-)

Apart from the RCS API Gateway for A2P and RCS Web Access, it has been demoed the Personal Manager, an specia RCS AS with additional features for the enterprise market. The idea is solving the overwhelming messaging mess creating personalized filters and autoresponses far more ambitious than the limited white/black lists.

And last but not least we just read a couple of mentions.
We were mentioned in the Frost&Sullivan MWC 2014 Key Takeaways slides by Ronald Gruia.

Also we were mentioned by Andre Rios from Barcinno.com talking about Telco APIs and listing Solaiemes as interesting company together big names as Apigee and Aepona.

Now, it's time to work even harder, this year will be our year!

Helping users to control the overwhelming messaging tsunami. RCS Personal Manager to the rescue.

Instant messaging is a hot topic (this week Facebook acquired Whatsapp, a great messaging app) but not everything is invented yet! The popularity and affordability of messaging is creating a "messaging mess" that can not be solved with white/black list strategy but enabling used to define their messaging filters as molding clay.



This enhanced experience can be provided with our RCS Personal Manager AS, that can be combined with whatever RCS Instant Messaging server in the market and let RCS fill a gap that OTT's are not solving yet. The UX can be integrated in the RCS client itself, or offered as standalone mobile App or website using our RCS PM API to access to the IM-BOX and PM Rule Manager.

Also, the PM can be used of opt-out easily from B2C cases. RCS is a Platform but no reason to bother users that can keep only for personal messaging. Flexibility is key :-)

We are eager for innovative telcos wanting to be the first in market with this solution and RCS Core vendors for partnering

See you in Barcelona this MWC 2014 !!!

Unified Communications based on RCS using RCS API & WebRTC.

See the new Unified Comms client based on telco assets. Combining RCS and voice you can create full UC experience in you browser combining messaging and media features. For media WebRTC is used, YES!!!! WebRTC is useful for RCS!



The 2 Solaiemes products needed are Solaiemes RCS Web Solution API and the WebRTC-Telco Gateway. The UX/look&feel can be fully customized to your requirements, do not worry :-)

See you at #MWC14 !

Facebook Private Call App: telco wedding with WebRTC and social networks.

Hi, we recently talked about our WebRTC-Telco Gateway and its SDK enabling new innovative telco services and mash-ups with internet. We included some services, in a demo service portal, to authorize to be reached at your mobile without disclosing your number, one of them was using Facebook Connect.

Now we just built as Facebook app the service. The idea is that you may prefer not to give your phone number to new friends but have an option allowing them to call you at your number. Yes! It is possible, see how.


With this approach, both telcos and social networks can partner and offer premium services for new communication experiences with an added value, in the example, to be reachen at your mobile normally without disclosing your number.

More services coming soon!

Solaiemes in the WIPjam developer event at #MWC14

Apart from exhibiting at the #MWC14 Solaiemes will be this year actively participating in a new collateral event, WIPjam, an event to engage de mobile developer community. We will be participating in:

• Telco API Workshop with representatives from very important companies Deutsche Telekom Developer Garden, Apigee, Broadsoft, Intel and the GSMA.


• Innovation Mashup Hackaton our technology exposing RCS as API will be used with other APIs from companies as Apigee, Dejamobile and Orange Partners.


• Expert Table where we will explain our strategy for developer engagement and RCS Monetization. Other companies participating in the Expert Table include Mozilla, Orange, Canonical and Dejamobile.

 We are ready for networking...

See you there !!!