Cistera Networks was founded over six years ago to provide solutions that build on the foundation of Voice over IP technology. As the founder of Cistera Networks, Greg has been instrumental in building the vision that has now positioned Cistera as the leading provider of Converged Solutions for Cisco and now Nortel Unified Communications platforms.

What makes Cistera Different?

Cistera has been working in the area of network based application integration for the past 6 years and particularly in the area of Application Telephony Integration for the last 4. I have seen a tremendous amount of change in the markets understanding and adoption of Application Driven Telephony and how IP Telephony impacts peoples perception communications. This year however we have seen a tremendous increase in both the understanding and the adoption of these tools.

Where Cistera stands out is that we were fortunate to see this shift early enough and bought products to market that helped people transition to this view of Application Driven Telephony. In many ways we were instrumental in this understanding and we are now perceived as being on the leading edge of this and hence a leader in this market.

What is Cistera's Insight?

I think Cistera's Insight was that early on we saw that people wanted to use IP Telephony as a pivot to improve key communications processes. They wanted to find ways to use this technology to improve customer interactions, compliance processes or quality assurance among other thinks.

However we felt strongly that in order for a customer to exploit these capabilities there needed to be a consistent and reliable mechanism for the delivery of these application and integration components. Couple that with a strong desire that the customer see no increase in administration costs, which is also a characteristic of IP Telephony in general, drew us to the conclusion that a platform for the scalable and reliable delivery of services was a large problem that the industry had to solve. We have been proved correct on this issue.

What are one or two things that Cistera does well?

Only two?. Cistera is fortunate that we have been first to market with the Cistera Convergence Server and hence we have an Engineering base that has a tremendous understanding of what it takes to implement these solutions into customer's networks. We are often helping partners improve their abillity to deliver these thereby increasing their professional services revenue and their full servicing capability. So I would stay our ability to deliver as well as our ability to be a valuable resource for our partners .

What are the challenges for Application Driven Telephony adoption ahead?

I think that we have still a way to go with educating the channel as how this area is affecting their ability to sell in a positive way. We still have many partners who see stove pipe applications as the best approach but the market view has changed. We worry that they may be left behind as the market moves towards platforms for the delivery of Application Driven Telephony. We have a great team that is working each day on delivering channel communications initiatives that help the channel understand and sell these solutions.

We are happy that companies like Microsoft have wholeheartedly supported our view of the world in the Unified Communications Strategy and we look forward to offering complementary solutions that support Microsoft's Desktop strength and Cisco's technology prowess.

Where next for Cistera?

I believe we have a lot of work to do to improve the customer integration tools, some call it Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Desktop Integration Tools throught the support for Cisco's and Microsoft's Unified Communications tools.

I also see a lot more devices that can live within this environment and improve the ability communicate and collaborate using IP Telephony as the pivot point. Case in point is Two Way Radio integration that we have completed with a number of customers. We see millions of potential devices that can be used with the Cistera Convergence Server in the future.