NMS reinvents itself as a software developer

NMS Communications Corp. plans to move out of its core business as a supplier of development kits for communications applications such as VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol), DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) and echo cancelation over the next three years, according to a company executive.

Instead, the company will position itself as a vendor of applications primarily for mobile telephony, said John Orlando, vice president and chief marketing officer at NMS Communications of Framingham.

A key ingredient for the company’s new strategy is likely to be its acquisition last month of Openera Technologies Inc., a Lexington, Massachusetts, provider of applications for converged mobile networks.

NMS Communications got about 80 percent of its $109.5 million revenue last year from selling development boards to communications equipment manufacturers, system integrators and application developers. But the revenue per port in has been decreasing, Orlando said. The revenue opportunity from software is far higher, he added.

Openera developed in Bangalore, India, its Mobile IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) Client, which consists of a development framework and applications such as peer-to-peer video sharing, Web sharing, push-to-talk over cellular, instant messaging and chat. Openera announced last month that Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. licensed Mobile IMS Client and some applications to integrate with its mobile phones.

Its SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) and IMS compliant framework allows operators and handset makers to add new applications and offer combinations of services to customers, said Manish Kumar, director of marketing at NMS Communications.

More than 20 operators have deployed MyCaller, NMS Communications’ mobile application, according to Orlando. MyCaller is a personalized “ringback” service that allows mobile-phone subscribers to replace the ring tone that callers hear with music, celebrity voices, corporate messages and other audio content, Orlando said.

Some of the company’s new focus areas in the mobile telephony market are applications for enhancing user interfaces, contextual search and content discovery, content management and personalized marketing on mobile networks, Orlando said.

NMS Communications also plans to move from a one-time sale and pricing model to one based on the number of transactions around its applications on the operator’s network, Orlando said.

NMS Communications expects the technology from its development boards business to get into new media servers and gateways, where the revenue potential is higher. “We get about $60 a port when we sell an E1 or a T1 board with some media resource on it,” said Orlando. ” We get anywhere between $600 to $1,500 a port when I sell a media server with VoiceXML [Extensible Markup Language] or video on it.”

The company’s AccessGate RAN (radio access network) Optimizer is catching on in emerging markets, as operators in these markets need to add more subscribers quickly without adding dedicated backhaul connections, Orlando said. “Some operators are looking at a 500 percent bandwidth increase over the next three or four years, and their networks aren’t prepared to deal with that,” he said.