It’s all about SIP, IMS and RCS, says company
It took Colibria all day yesterday to come up with a statement on why it has sold its IMPS business to Synchronica. Given that this deal can’t exactly have taken it by surprise, it seems strange that it didn’t have its story straight at the same time as Synchronica was telling the world what had happened.
In any case, Colibria’s explanation for taking Synchronica’s money and shares was that it wants to concentrate on IMS and SIP-based convergence, instead of its OMA IMPS-based mobile instant messaging and communities business.
Having had as much success as anyone in the IM gateway and IMPS presence server space, Colibria has now decided that its future lies in the SIP, RCS and IMS fields.
Its statement said, “The ability and strength of the business in the key areas of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), Rich Communications Suite (RCS) and IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is a crucial and important factor in making this divestment decision. It will also allow Colibria to invest in the rapidly growing areas of SMS over IP and Colibria’s socially aware Network Address Book where the company has proven technology leadership.”
CEO Keith Gibson said, “Colibria will continue to grow in technology areas that play to its strengths. The increasing interest for our SIP Presence and RCS Convergence solutions has exceeded our expectations and we will now focus the business on these key areas. Last month we announced that we have already shipped over 750,000 licences in this market and we confidently expect to continue that rate with the support of our expanding sales channels.”
It’s interesting to see that despite the current contracts Colibria has, it now sees the opportunity around SIP and RCS. This reflects the move in mature markets towards IP RAN and core networks, and the needs of mobile operators to build and manage services across those networks. It also throws Colibria up against some of the heaviest hitters in signalling and session control technologies. But then, as its experience in IM showed, it has been there before and carved out a market.