Hosted VoIP has enabled many new players to step into the role of voice service provider. One of the most recent additions to this cast is Nectar Services, a subsidiary of Juma Technology (News - Alert) Corp whose primary business has been IT system integration for large enterprises.

 

With the announcement of new voice, connectivity and managed services this year, Nectar (News - Alert) appears to have joined the ranks of service providers, providing the kinds of offerings that used to be the province only of facilities-based service providers.

 

The company characterizes itself as a “managed-services provider,” says Joe Fuccillo, President & CTO, Nectar Services. Its suite of services “are all about managing a customer’s migration to converged communication at a high level. Though they are all different, they are designed to do that migration.”

 

Nectar services include Enterprise Session Management (ESM), which provides carrier-class routing, session management, and SIP and H.323 gateways to unite a company’s disparate IP PBXs into one communication system. The service uses IP networking to eliminate multiple trunks among branch offices.  

 

The company also added a hosted-VoIP service for enterprises, mostly as a way to unite smaller branch offices, seamlessly, with a larger network of hosted and managed PBXs.

Another part of the service essentially provides session border controller functionality as a service. “The idea came a couple of years ago when we were working with some SIP trunks and had a whale of a time trying to get them to work,” Fuccillo explains. When Nectar suggested enterprise customers buy a product, such as the NexTone (News - Alert) Networks Inc. (now NextPoint Networks Inc.) box, “they just about fell off the chair with $100,000 price point. So we developed a concept that could take multiple SIP trunks and terminate them on the left side of the box, while we could build connections to our enterprise customers off that box. We would be the middleware layer and allow all these different systems to use multiple carriers.”

In one key way, Nectar differs from most service providers. “People ask, are you a carrier, but carriers never want to get inside the demarc,” says Fuccillo. But, with Nectar’s origin as an integrator, “our roots are very strong [inside the demarc], so we thought we could take the best of both worlds and create a new market segment.”

 

Nectar is not alone in this new segment, though it may be the first true integrator to take up managed services so strongly. “That combination of hosted telephony, integrated services and premises services, the AT&Ts of the world do that, but especially [very-large] system integrators, like IBM or EDS,” says Krithi Rao, industry analyst, premises and unified communication, Frost & Sullivan (News - Alert). “Of the typical system integrators, Nectar is one of first to provide hosted services as well.”

Nectar has put a significant new stake in the ground with its particular combination of services, but it may not have the market to itself for long. “It takes months [to launch a similar package], but managed services is really picking up,” Rao continues. “Most of the vendors want a big stake in it. Hosted telephony, though, has not been in the limelight. Nectar put it together, saying you can go with hosted services and, if you don’t like it, you can go premises, and we can manage it, If you want.”

She adds that it is possible for other integrators to get into the same model, combining managed and hosted services, but the business equation would have to work at a business and technical level. “There would have to be some business opportunity that was not addressed because they did not have a hosted solution,” Rao says. “If they have just managed services, then maybe they don’t have a need to add hosted.”