Perspectives on JAJAH’s SIP Trunking Partnership with Microsoft

On August 25, JAJAH announced a partnership with Microsoft that has interesting implications for Unified Communications. JAJAH is not as well known in UC circles as Microsoft, but their SIP Trunking service integrates with OCS, and helps extend Microsoft’s UC capabilities beyond the desktop, making it truly ubiquitous. To explore this further, I recently conducted a Q&A interview with Trevor Healy, JAJAH’s CEO.

I’ve followed JAJAH closely from the beginning, and this is another example of how they’ve grown to become a key partner for many Tier 1 companies, further validating what I call the platform play strategy for service providers. I’ll continue following this partnership, and hope to update the UCS portal soon. Until then, here’s my interview with Trevor.

Your news with Microsoft to provide SIP Trunking is very interesting in several regards, and before we explore that, please tell us a bit about how this partnership came about.

Microsoft has been very supportive of JAJAH almost since the beginning. We have been part of the Microsoft Startup Accelerator Program since January 2008 and have maintained a solid relationship since then. As Microsoft has continued its focus on Unified Communications via Office Communications Server, the discussions began to shift on how we could work together to help enterprises with their global communications needs. Becoming a certified SIP Trunking provider for OCS was the obvious next step – we have the global telco-grade IP Communications network and they have the UC platform.

For followers of UC Strategies not familiar with JAJAH, perhaps you could explain briefly about where you fit in the IP communications ecosystem, and what makes the company so distinct.

JAJAH has a dual role. On one level we provide a range of advanced IP voice solutions to enterprises, SMEs and individuals. With a range of offerings across mobile IP voice, landline and web-based, the JAJAH suite of solutions helps companies and individuals take advantage of IP telephony without requiring infrastructure upgrades.

In addition, JAJAH has developed the most advanced end-to-end IP Communications Platform to give telcos, Internet businesses and cable companies the ability to offer these services to their customers as a fully managed solution and for enterprises to deliver services to their employees and empower them. The Platform incorporates all necessary management services, such as billing, payments, termination, fraud management, customer service (etc etc), to allow our partners to outsource the entire management of the service to JAJAH.

Before getting to the Microsoft news, I’d like you to build on this by sharing your views on Unified Communications and how JAJAH brings new capabilities to business users.

Unified Communications is more than just integrated email, IM, voice and video. We believe it extends across the entire organization and into every form of communication. JAJAH’s offering brings solutions for mobile and home workers into the UC umbrella via our range of simple to use solutions for any device, any location, any network. 

It’s important to understand that most UC solutions are confined to the enterprise’s premise, and do not extend well to mobile employees and environments. JAJAH’s solutions bridge that gap and help the organization realize end-to-end UC value.

SIP Trunking has been a big driver for UC recently – what does your solution bring to Microsoft that’s different, and did you specifically have them in mind in deciding to move into this space?

JAJAH SIP Trunking is just one of JAJAH’s Enterprise solutions, and we are the only SIP Trunking provider that extends IP calling throughout the organization’s workforce, regardless of where they are located globally, if they are at home or on the road.

The JAJAH platform includes solutions for all mobile and smart phones, including BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Android and iPhone, as well as landlines and desktop/laptop/tablet computer solutions, including soft-phones, click-to-call and dial-back.

All solutions fully integrate with Microsoft OCS to further extend the benefits of unified communications across the organization.

JAJAH has been supplying award winning telephony solutions to mobile workers, desk-based employees, home workers and everything in between for many years. These services were developed on the basis of being simple to implement, simple to use. We believe the most cost-effective service can be rendered useless if it meets with resistance from employees.

We know that Microsoft has been working with various partners to bring voice and full-featured UC to OCS. What type of business customers is their offering with JAJAH best suited for? Will this help them address new opportunities – and if so, what would they be?

First and foremost Microsoft certified JAJAH for its capability as a SIP Trunking provider, so the basic answer is any organization which has a need for voice communications over two or more locations. But the key difference for JAJAH are the other solutions we bring to the table that help companies with mobile or home workers to also benefit from IP calling. By integrating these solutions an organization has even greater ROI.

Most business customers who are interested in SIP Trunking are multinational organizations that have offices across many locations and require IP connectivity between branches and to outside contacts.

One thing that comes to mind right away is your strategic relationship with Yahoo to be their voice services platform. Did this play a role in developing your offering with Microsoft, and do you envision any synergies coming from being partners with both?

JAJAH has been chosen by a large number of major corporations. Yahoo is one, and we manage the Yahoo Premium Voice service. Intel is another, and we worked together on bringing IP telephony to Intel’s Wake On technology. Each partner chose JAJAH because our Platform provides the highest quality and most flexible solutions.

The support for OCS is quite different to our support for Yahoo! Premium Voice, so it’s hard to see synergies, but our ability to scale to millions of users for Yahoo definitely played a part in our readiness to take on demanding enterprise customers.

Another aspect of JAJAH that may not be well understood is the global reach of your platform, which I presume is important for Microsoft to extend UC solutions to large enterprise customers. How important was that in developing this partnership, and what does JAJAH bring to Microsoft in this regard that other could not?

Absolutely. JAJAH is active in over 200 countries, with billing, payments and termination capability. It’s a cliché, but as the world shrinks, enterprises need a global communications capability that is simple and cost efficient.

If I’m an enterprise IT Director using OCS, are there any issues I need to address with JAJAH in terms of scale, security, reliability, billing, etc. before moving forward with this?

The actual SIP Trunking interop is straight-forward and does not differ from other solution providers. The main difference enterprises will notice is how easy it is to work with JAJAH, a small, dynamic and flexible company that prides itself on being very attentive to customers. As an anecdote, it’s worth mentioning that we certified for OCS in record time, and that really impressed Microsoft. Since we are a technology company at our core (unlike competitors who are mostly infrastructure providers), we really have the ability to react to changing needs and quickly provide the required solutions.

Staying with that theme, what are some of the new capabilities I can now extend to end users that I couldn’t really do before with OCS?

By working with JAJAH, you can connect your OCS deployment to the global network as well as enable your mobile work force to enjoy the same cost reduction and productivity gains.

More specifically, how will this SIP Trunking service make UC more real and more beneficial to my company?

What we found, when talking to enterprise customers about SIP Trunking, is that they immediately identify the issue of lack of mobile access and the need to support the natural way employees communicate (by picking up their mobile phone to make a call). JAJAH allows the organization to enable all types of end-points, which contributes to the adoption of UC throughout the organization.