Macromedia is a company that is perhaps best known as a web development tools vendor with such notable products as Flash, Dreamweaver, and Breeze. Thanks to a slew of announcements this year, it’s also a player in the VoIP market as well. Macromedia is now set to be part of Adobe Inc.
In May of this year, Macromedia updated its Breeze Web conferencing application with VoIP features. Among those features is a telephony gateway that companies can link to their existing telephony bridges. In recent weeks, Macromedia has pushed its VoIP strategy even further with vendors including Avaya, Cisco, and Hewlett-Packard.
Cisco will be integrating Flash-based web conferencing into some of its conferencing products, using components of both Macromedia Flash Platform and Breeze. Cisco’s MeetingPlace Express web conferencing solution, announced in September, is the first Cisco product to make use of the Macromedia technology. Avaya is likewise set to integrate Breeze with the Avaya Meeting Exchange conferencing solution.
HP, too, has been pulled into the Macromedia fold and will be integrating and marketing the Macromedia Flash Platform along with its own HP Service Delivery Platform (HP SDP), which lets providers deliver content across fixed and mobile networks.
All this activity fits into Macromedia’s overall VoIP vision.
“Our vision is that VoIP is going to be only a feature of larger applications that will command increased margin for service operators,” Guillaume Privat, senior product manager, telecommunications solutions, Macromedia told VoIPplanet.com.
Privat explained that Macromedia’s goal is to position the Flash Platform as the default user experience platform for service providers and network equipment providers to deploy rich integrated communications services and applications.
“For example, carriers tend to have different business units to run their VoIP business, their audio conferencing business, or their web conferencing business,” Privat said. “Our solution, Breeze, offers operators a platform to integrate all these services into a combined integrated conferencing solution.” Privat cited the deployments by Cisco and Avaya as examples of Macromedia’s strategy of providing customers with rich integrated conferencing solutions.
“The next step is to add services like presence and location to achieve truly converged communications,” Privat continued. “This is what we have done with HP and our service chaining prototype, which links services like group list, presence, location, audio, and web conferencing into a single and seamless business process.”
According to Privat, to date Macromedia has been “very pleased” with the relationships it has developed with Cisco, Avaya, and HP.
“Our goal in partnering with Cisco, Avaya, or HP is to build an ecosystem to deliver carrier-grade solutions based on the Flash Platform to tier 1 service providers,” Privat said. “Our focus is now to engage with service providers.”
“We are hoping to make major announcements in the coming quarters.”
