For the vast majority of startups trying to get off the ground, it’s always a dogfight to balance the books, to get a solid number of customers, as well as reassure the industry that their solution is important, adds value, and is going to stick around.

IMSWorkX, a telecoms network solutions provider based in Rochester, New York, managed to adroitly sidestep these problems.

Branching off the more established networking firm Performance Technologies (PT), the company has been working on its product for almost five years before bringing it out of PT in December 2012, and going live a month later with a customer base already installed.

Headed by CEO Shannon Chevier, with VP global sales operations Keith Abbott representing the UK arm, IMSWorkX offers a series of products to companies, from call routing, to voice messaging and telemarketing guards, as well as providing a service delivery platform on a SIP application server.

As Abbott noted, IMSWorkX is a “startup with a head start”.

But while the product set is impressive, the most exciting aspect of the company is its commitment to help operators move from legacy infrastructure to “IP anywhere” networks.

“There is a transition that has to occur, and we’re at the middle of it,” Chevier explains to TelecomsTech. “The proliferation of LTE, the densities that are being asked for are just huge, [and] the traditional legacy network cannot handle the capacity.

“The operators are finding the time is now. Every potential customer we talk to is planning their LTE – it’s been talked about for a long time, been talked about for more than a decade, but now we’re finding people are putting their plans in place.”

Chevier adds that in many cases it’s the legacy equipment vendors who are responsible for the change.

“There’s been a number of traditional network elements that have gone end of life and end of support, and that’s really forcing some of the hands, if you like,” she adds.

Enter IMSWorkX, with a new fully-integrated product set to launch at the end of 2013 which is utilised “to bridge between new technology, but still provide the same feature set,” as Chevier puts it.

Abbott describes it as “quite unique” – acknowledging the tautology – and adds: “This allows you to deploy one platform, with one piece of software that is the service, and deliver that service to old telecoms networks, the newer IP based telephone networks, and if an operator is deploying – or will deploy in the future – into the IMS infrastructures that are developing now in telecoms.

“It’s legacy support, current support and future support, so it makes it a universal and future-proof platform”, he explains.

This completely fits in with the company’s mission statement “to deliver safe, reliable and comprehensive solutions for every generation of communication networks.”

Yet while it’s safe to say IMSWorkX isn’t the only company in the world with such a vision, Chevier notes that the Rochester-based firm has a leg up on the competition.

“As a startup you get a lot of questions as to what you’re bringing to the table,” Chevier explains. “But being able to demonstrate that there is a product, that it’s mature, it’s stable, already deployed, compatible with networks…that alleviates a lot of concerns that might traditionally plague a startup.

“We get to avoid a lot of that,” she adds.

This article is part of TelecomsTech’s occasional series featuring startups in the telecoms industry. Check out previous articles here, and find out more about IMSWorkX here.