Mobile Cloud Exchange Challenges Centrex and IMS

BARCELONA, Spain, February 14, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- OnRelay today introduced its Mobile Cloud Exchange (MCX) product designed for telecom operators. OnRelay's Mobile Cloud Exchange is already deployed at 10 leading operators across 4 continents, including at Swisscom as recently announced.

"Our software has continuously evolved and gradually centred on enabling the enormous Cloud Telephony opportunity for operators," says OnRelay's CEO, Ivar Plahte. "We no longer feel existing PBX or Centrex terminology accurately represent a cloud based mobile office phone system, and it is time to introduce a new term - Mobile Cloud Exchange - for this distinct and disruptive communications system architecture."

Mobile operators now face the immediate threat from "Over the Top" Mobile VoIP services from the likes of Skype and Google taking foothold in the business communications market. To date, operators' fixed-mobile convergence products have been little more than creative billing options, which will not suffice to meet this threat. Given the speed of market evolution, operators do not have time to wait for service delivery platforms, such as IMS, before they start introducing competitive solutions.

With its Mobile Cloud Exchange software, OnRelay enables the mobile operator to immediately fight back with a bundled Communications as a Service offering, which, unlike consumer oriented Mobile VoIP services, is far more feature rich and delivers the appropriate 3G / GSM quality of service required by business customers. Mobile operators can leverage their unique position by bundling OnRelay's software with smartphones, mobile apps, cloud services and 3G / GSM / femto-cell connectivity.

Viable alternatives are scarce. Coming out of the financial recession, operators are faced with a new, harsher economic reality. CIOs and end-customers are no longer willing to fund expensive and high-risk 'white elephant' service platform projects such as IMS, WAP, ATM and IN. Plahte observes, "One such 'white elephant' based service, Centrex, has suffered from lack of flexibility, customisation, application integration and self-management." He continues, "Business customers are also concerned about locking in to the monolithic Centrex model with very limited ownership, control, and system administration rights."

"Further, our data is showing that CIOs are growing weary of IP PBX rollout projects with poor mobile telephony integration and substantial hardware, integration and support costs," Plahte commented. "According to a report from Forrester Consulting out this year, a majority of business customers are looking to operators to provide a more cost efficient, hosted telephony model - something they have not found in Centrex."

With its Mobile Cloud Exchange, OnRelay offers operators a pre-validated, commercially available and cost efficient solution. Benefiting from the efficiency of cloud computing, OnRelay is offering proof of concept trials based on Amazon EC2 to market leading mobile operators globally.

http://www.onrelay.com

Lisa-Marie Gibbons, lisa.gibbons@onrelay.com, +44(0)207-902-8100

SOURCE OnRelay Ltd