September 2004 Archives

And the acquisitions keep piling up!

Artisoft, Inc., announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire privately held Vertical Networks, Inc. Vertical Networks makes distributed IP-PBX software and communications solutions for large enterprises. With the acquisition, Artisoft is looking to increase its customer base and market, including the addition of several large enterprise customers in the retail, financial services, and healthcare verticals, as well as expand the breadth and scope of its technology and product offerings to include distributed enterprise solutions.

Under the acquisition agreement, Artisoft will pay up to $19 million in cash for Vertical Networks. The acquisition is expected to close within several business days.

Artisoft Chairman William Y. Tauscher will serve as chairman and CEO, and Vertical Networks founder Scott K. Pickett will serve as CTO, of the combined company.

The acquisition watch continues. Who will be next?

Niklas Zennström, CEO and co-founder of Skype, will address the audience at Internet Telephony Conference & EXPO in Los Angeles on October 6. Mr. Zennström will present via videoconference from London, England. There’s still time to register to attend the event. Don’t miss this opportunity to hear a keynote address from one of the more interesting personalities in the VoIP space.

The October issue of Internet Telephony magazine will feature a brief interview with Mr. Zennström. Here’s a sneak peek at some of what he had to say.

IT: In light of the tremendous competition in the VoIP space, how much of an impact do you believe P2P telephony can have in capturing market share away from established service providers?
NZ: They have a competitive disadvantage since they already have a huge cost structure and they will not be able to take advantage of the new technologies, and the cost savings, when you don't need to deploy any infrastructure.

IT: Some folks question why Skype does not support SIP. How do you respond to these people?NZ: Skype has been downloaded more than 21 million times, that make the Skype base much bigger than the SIP base. When we decided to create Skype, one of the reasons was that SIP did not do a good job on the real Internet, where people are behind firewalls and NATs. Skype solves those problems.

IT: How secure is your service and can it be wiretapped if need be?
NZ: I am not aware of any telephony service that is as secure as Skype. We have created a PKI infrastructure which uses 256-bit AES strong, U.S. government encryption, also due to the PKI, it’s not possible to do identity theft. Therefore it is not possible to wiretap.

Building on recent distributions deals with Ingram Micro and Navarre, Packet8 has announced that Internet shoppers can now find Packet8 VoIP products and services online at Amazon.com.

The Packet8 offerings currently featured at Amazon.com include the recently introduced DV326 Broadband VideoPhone, which is designed to work like a regular telephone and delivers video calls over a high-speed Internet connection, and the DTA Broadband Phone Adapter, which is designed to allow a regular phone to make and receive calls worldwide over the Internet, with accompanying VoIP service plans.

Both Packet8 offerings at Amazon.com are accompanied by special promotional incentives including a mail-in rebate on the DTA adapter of $60 until along with free activation and two months of free service and a $200 mail-in rebate on one Packet8 VideoPhone, $500 mail in rebate for two, along with free activations and one free month of service.

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Weekend recap: The Mets won 2 out of 3 from the Cubbies this weekend, unfortunately, the home team decided to lose in front of me. Well, me and several thousand rabid Cubs fans who turned Shea Stadium into Wrigley east for the weekend. Still, it was a beautiful night for a game.

Speaking of beautiful nights, some friends and I headed out for a night of striper fishing in the Long Island Sound on Saturday. Heading out of Glen Cove, NY on the Sea Otter West we never did manage to land any keeper stripers. The one bass we landed was tiny and was tossed back to fight another day. However we did load up on buckets and buckets of cocktail blues. Thanks to Capt. Glenn and mates Marco & Nick. And a big thanks to Z-man for setting up this trip.

Autumn officially arrived this past Wednesday. I love autumn in New York. There's something special about the added chill in the air, as September turns to October, and the year-in, year-out spectacle of autumn baseball in NY. I'm a lifelong Mets fan, and yet I'm not one of those "anybody but the Yankees" Mets fan. I love my home town, and the fact that we have two major league baseball teams makes this place that much better.

As the Mets were locked in the clumsy ballet of a race to the basement with Montreal, the Yankees were busy solidifying their reservation to the post season. Of course the real excitement comes this weekend in Boston as the Sox will try to avenge the shellacking NY gave them last week. While many Mets fans will root for the Red Sox to beat NY, I say good luck Bronx Bombers. Go NY!

It's like if the Jets don't do well, I'm happy to root for the Giants.
And if the Knicks aren't so hot, I can with clean conscience pull for the Nets.
And when the Rangers don't do well, I can still work out my frustrations by cursing the Devils and bad mouthing the Islanders. I realize one of those things is not like the others, but hey... A guy can only do so much in terms of one city's sports teams!

Still, Mets fan I am, so I'll be heading out to the park tonight to spend some quality Galitzine time with my dad and my brother. And while sitting in the stands at Shea with the season woefully out of reach carries shades of the early scenes from the movie Major League, (Too high! Too high!) they're still my team. And more importantly, sharing a beer or two with my family can't possibly be beat. My brother and I did grow up in Flushing after all.

I'm also heading out to Long Island to do some striper fishing tomorrow. (Shout outs, mad props, greetings, and salutations to Capt. Glen and the Sea Otter West!) I'll let you know Monday how that went! My buddies tell me it's called fishing, not catching, but with me, hope springs eternal.

October is also when my family and I trek up to Toronto to my in-laws for Canadian Thanksgiving. This year we're heading up a week early. I'm dropping off my wife, my twins, and my pooch and heading from there to Los Angeles, site of this year's Internet Telephony Conference & EXPO. The event promises to be one of the largest ever in the VoIP space. There's so much interesting content in the conference, and the Exhibt Hall will be packed with the industry's leading vendors too.

And then, on my return trek to NY, I'll stop in to Toronto to pick up my family and hopefully get a hearty helping of Thanksgiving dinner - Canadian style. Of course the best part of any Thanksgiving dinner is plopping down on the couch to watch sports. Unfortunately, the NHL owners have seen to it that while I'm on a couch in Toronto I'll not have any hockey to watch. But that's a whole 'nother argument for a whole 'nother time.

Have a great weekend folks! Fishing report on Monday!

Frost & Sullivan has released a report covering the World Session Border Controller Market. Prepared by Jon Arnold, program leader, VoIP Equipment at Frost, the report defines what Session Border Controllers (SBC) are, why they are important, and outlines a market forecast pegging the growth of the market at a rate of nearly 60% by 2008.

The report details a complex vendor landscape, and Frost expects the market to continue to evolve significantly over the next 2–3 years. Arnold profiles 12 SBC vendors, and has created a unique strategic matrix that plots the market positioning for 18 vendors based on their function set and markets served.

The market forecast, calls for strong short-term growth culminating in a leveling-off and eventual slight decline. According to Arnold, “…revenues will peak at $300 million in 2007, and decline slightly from there to $250 million. Expected 2004 revenues are $70 million.”

This report concludes with an assessment of the key issues and strategic implications facing SBC vendors. Frost & Sullivan believes that support for multiple approaches to SBC exists today, but as customer needs evolve, standalone vendors will have a difficult time servicing their customers growing and evolving needs, resulting in a market opportunity for equipment vendors focused in other areas, such as softswitching, media gateways, routers, and the like.

The 70-page-report is available for $3,250.

Toshiba has announced the launch of its new generation family of IP business telephones, in advance of the introduction of its first native IP telephony system, the new Strata CIX business communications system. The company will debut the CIX at the upcoming Internet Telephony Conference & EXPO being held in Los Angeles this October 4-7.

Compatible with Toshiba’s Strata CTX and Strata CIX business communications systems, the Toshiba IPT2010-SD and IPT2020-SD telephones are now available.

Toshiba’s IPT2010-SD and IPT2020-SD are 10 and 20-button telephones, respectively, with two-line by 24 character displays.

Notable features include full duplex speaker phone functionality; Power over Ethernet (IEEE 802.3af) support; and Peer-to-Peer functionality, which allows Toshiba’s IP 2000-series phones to communicate with other 2000-series phones directly over IP.

“We are pleased to announce our new generation Toshiba IP telephones that take advantage of the promise of IP telephony by delivering virtually all of the Strata CTX’s functionality over IP,” said Michael Durance, vice president and general manager of TAIS DSD.

Often overlooked in favor of the flashier cellular handset side of the family, Nokia’s network division has announced some interesting news at the Broadband World Forum in Venice, Italy. Nokia has launched a new solution for broadband operators, which — according to the company — will enable VoIP services to be combined with broadband. The Nokia Voice solution brings POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) compatibility to the Nokia D500 IP DSLAM, connecting traditional voice connections to a packet-based network.

The D500 supports SIP and provides the QoS features for connectivity with WLAN-enabled terminals and PCs.

The market for such convergence platforms is still ripe, as there is still a long way to go before the world is entirely communicating over IP. The entrenched TDM network is not going away any time soon, and solutions such as the D500 from Nokia are vital to interworking between legacy networks and IP-based networks.

The press release announcing this solution can be found here.

AT&T is launching an Innovation & Interoperability program aimed at enabling its partners to build products and design services that will be compatible with AT&T’s VoIP portfolio.

Charter Members of the program include chip manufacturers Broadcom, Centillium, Intel and Texas Instruments; CPE vendors D-Link, Linksys, and NETGEAR; IP PBX makers Alcatel, Avaya, Cisco, Nortel Networks, and Siemens, and softswitch/gateway provider Sonus Networks.

This alliance program will allow AT&T tremendous access to and partnership opportunities with the IP telephony industry’s leading equipment and development platform companies. The move is clearly aimed at solidifying AT&T’s offering and driving AT&T-branded VoIP services into the mainstream.

The release announcing the VoIP Innovation and Interoperability Program can be found here.

Ford Motor Company has selected SBC to design, implement, and manage an advanced IP telephony network comprised mainly of Cisco gear.

The solution is designed to converge Ford's disparate communications networks into a single IP-based network, carrying voice, video and data. SBC will deploy a customized solution based on their PremierSERV IP Telephony Advantage platform, using the Cisco’s IP Communications system. The network will include approximately 50,000 Cisco IP telephones, rolled out to users in 110 Ford facilities in southeast Michigan over three years. SBC engineers will work at Ford's Dearborn data center to manage the service on an ongoing basis.

Read the full press release here

If you find yourself living and studying abroad, learning to stir sauces in Provence, or stirring watercolors for your Art class in Florence, you understand that culture is so much easier to come by than cold hard cash. A student is a student, and more often than not, they’re just as strapped for Euros as they are for dollars. Well, a new service from Lingo may be just the ticket to staying in touch with your family. I mean, why spend all of your parents’ money on calling home to ask for more money?

For just $7.95 a month, Lingo, the high-speed VoIP service from Primus Telecommunications, is offering a new calling service designed to enable any two Lingo customers to call each other from anywhere in the world and talk for an unlimited amount of time.

The service is designed for individuals who place frequent calls to the same people, and is available to anyone who has a broadband Internet connection. So if you find yourself putting down roots in Rome, Italy, and your family is rooted in Rome, NY, Lingo Link might be just what the doctor ordered.

The service covers all incoming calls, and included voice-mail means you don’t miss any of those calls. Calls to non-subscribers are charged Lingo’s usual long-distance VoIP rates (for example, $0.03 per minute for calls to the U.S. and Canada).

I’m glad to see service providers such as Lingo raising the bar and providing the kind of services we’ve been writing about for years in Internet Telephony magazine. Specifically, services that make sense for users, services that will drive IP minutes of use skyward, and services that can be adapted and changed to suit a variety of groups as need be.

This is the true benefit of switching to IP and it thrills me to see services such as Lingo Link exploding onto the scene.

Tekelec just announced that it has acquired VocalData, Inc., a provider of hosted IP Telephony applications.

Tekelec purchased 100 percent of VocalData's outstanding stock for approximately $27.5 million, consisting of $14.5 million of cash and approximately 780,000 shares of Tekelec common stock, or $13.0 million, based on today's closing price. VocalData will be integrated into Tekelec's Next-Generation Switching business unit.

VocalData, headquartered in Richardson, Texas, is a North American market share leader in IP Centrex, accounting for 44 percent of all IP Centrex lines deployed at the end of 2003, based on 2003 IP Centrex NA line shipments reported in a recent Frost & Sullivan study.

Tekelec will leverage VocalData's hosted IP telephony application server to provide an immediate path to IP service delivery and profitability for wireless, wireline and cable operators and their subscribers.

With last week's dynamicsoft acquisiton by Cisco, it sure looks like the VoIP market is once again heating up -- and I'm not talking subscriber growth.

Who's next?

Stay tuned.

According to a recent report published by IDATE, a European information and communications technologies consultancy, VoIP will continue to grow rapidly, culminating in 40% of business lines to be operating over IP by 2009.

We’ve all heard the reasoning behind the decision to move from TDM to IP. This is not news:
• a single network to manage;
• lower price of infrastructure;
• lower MAC and maintenance costs; and most importantly,
• the ability to quickly and efficiently create and deploy new services.

But the report does cite the high potential of VoIP, and points out the following overriding trends:

• By 2009 close to 40% of business lines will be IP-based (180 million lines), regardless of the solution used, which will mean the disappearance of close a third of classic analogue and ISDN lines.
• Centrex (hosted) services will generate roughly 4.5 billion EUR in revenues in 2009.
• Revenues generated by calling will drop by close to 50%.
• Conference type services, directory management and XML applications will generate 4.9 billion EUR in sales.

And yet, there are several factors, according to IDATE, that will continue to act as a brake in the overall adoption of IP telephony in the marketplace.

• Initial investment. IP phones in particular are more expensive than standard phones. IP solutions carry an added cost (as compared to a classic solution) of between 25% and 30%.
• Security. Viral attacks, intrusions and eavesdropping are all sources of great concern. The costs of securing an IP-based telephony solution carries additional costs as well.
• The difficulty of calculating ROI and TCO. Precise calculations might be difficult, considering the difficulty in establishing the benefits of introducing new features.

I for one see many hurdles ahead for VoIP adoption, but these hurdles can and will be overcome. It’s only a matter of time. Our industry has always held the belief that it’s not a question of if but a question of when “telephony” will become “IP telephony.” That remains true today. We can no sooner stop the evolution of telecom than we can stop any of the hurricanes from pummeling the Caribbean and Southern U.S.

Microsoft and Polycom today announced a joint marketing and development agreement to deliver rich media collaboration solutions. The initial offering, is scheduled for release in late 2004, and will combine the presence and IM capabilities of Microsoft’s Live Communications Server and Windows Messenger with a slew of Polycom's desktop and group video conference systems, IP phones, voice and video bridges; and the conference portal.

The solution will support SIP from infrastructure to the endpoint. Microsoft and Polycom's SIP strategy is designed to deliver a customer solution that combines the benefits of video with voice, instant messaging, applications, business processes, Web services and Web collaboration.

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SIP is all over the wires today, with Cisco’s just-announced acquisition of dynamicsoft. Fellow blogger Tom Keating has more on that item in his blog here.

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In other SIP news, BorderWare Technologies announced SIPassure, a SIP Firewall. SIPassure is a hardware device designed to manage and protects the flow of VoIP-specific SIP communications, and will be available in two models, an enterprise and a carrier model.

Developed over the past 12 months and designed to sit alongside SIP-based IP PBXs such as Cisco CallManager and Avaya Communications Manager, SIPassure deploys at the network edge or in the DMZ and manages all inbound and outbound SIP sessions.

According to the company’s news release, SIPassure:
• prevents voice spam, DoS/DDoS protection (RTP, SIP REGISTRAR), voice mail bombing (vbomb) and packet-level intrusion prevention
• provides robust firewall features including stateful inspection with policy-based packet filtering and SIP and RTP message validation
• functions as a SIP proxy server, redirect server, and registrar server (IETF RFC 3261)
• functions as an incoming and outgoing proxy, providing integrity checks for malformed SIP messages, ensuring that only correctly formatted messages are forwarded
• provides NAT (Network Address Translation) and firewall traversal (RTP proxy)
• includes comprehensive reporting and auditing
• supports SNMP for integration with network management frameworks (i.e. HP OpenView, IBM Tivoli, etc.)

Nortel Networks is announcing new solutions designed to change the way business is conducted, enabling the “Virtual Enterprise” by providing applications geared toward allowing remote, geographically-dispersed workers to function as a collocated, cohesive, and integrated team.

In a pre-briefing for industry press last week, Nortel’s Vickie Marvich-McGovern, director, Enterprise Multimedia Solutions, shared Nortel’s vision and outlined a number of product portfolio enhancements driving the notion of the Virtual Enterprise. “Work is no longer somewhere you go,” she said. “It’s something that goes with you.”

To that end, Nortel Networks is announcing a suite of office tools accessible via the end-user’s computer, regardless of whether it is a desktop, laptop, tablet, or handheld PC. Using user-friendly icons, a person can immediately contact a colleague to share information and access applications via the most effective means, regardless of their location. The solution is designed to allow remote workers to be as “present” as their office bound colleagues.

Nortel Networks today introduced the following new product capabilities:

Nortel Networks Communications Server 1000, Release 4.0: This new call server software tightly integrates the Communication Server 1000 business grade telephony with MCS 5100 SIP-based multimedia applications to deliver highly reliable and feature-rich voice, data, and video services to users anywhere, anytime, driving increased mobility, collaboration, and productivity.

Nortel Networks Multimedia Communications Server 5100 Release 3.0: Release 3.0 delivers voice, call management, desktop video calling, collaboration tools and personalization services to a distributed workforce. This new code release offers enhanced video capabilities with multi-point video conferencing, new Instant Messaging capabilities as well as Web application collaboration that allows applications and documents to be shared in real time.

Nortel Networks Communication Server 2100: Designed for very large enterprises that require carrier-class reliability, this product enhancement provides improved support for the SIP protocol and new wireless IP telephones. Based on industry-standards, it can accommodate third-party applications and gateways.

Nortel Networks Symposium Call Center Server Release 5.0: This innovation enhances network skill-based routing to provide more flexibility for enterprises when creating a virtual contact center.

Nortel Networks IP Telephones, Models 2006 and 2007: With a full-color display and the rich feature set of Nortel Networks IP telephone portfolio, the IP Phone 2007 offers Bluetooth compatibility and USB peripheral support. The IP Phone 2006 offers an improved display.

Vonage, the broadband phone company, announced that Office Depot will now sell its IP communications services in over 700 of its stores as well as online.

Last week, rival AT&T announced that their CallVantage service would be available online at Amazon.com and at over 600 Best Buy outlets nationwide.

At this rate, how long will it be before my wife send me out to the local 7-11 store to pick up milk and I come home with a new phone service? (Please, no replies about how most of the phone cards sold over the Qwikie-Mart counter are utilizing VoIP already.)

All kidding aside, this mass marketing of VoIP services bodes well for our industry, as this puts VoIP in the spotlight and gives people an alternative to traditional phone services.

Anyhow, customers can sign up for Vonage service by purchasing one of two Vonage starter kits at Office Depot, both featuring Linksys devices. Either device offers customers the ability to select one of several flat-rate, full-featured residential and small business broadband telephony calling plans in the U.S. and Canada starting at $14.99.

"The national roll out of Vonage's broadband telephony product at Office Depot presents a great opportunity, which will allow us to prove the value of our products on retail shelves," said Daniel Elwell, director of New Business Development for Vonage. "We are looking forward to transform the telecommunications industry with successful sales margins with one of the nation's top retailers, as Office Depot's market savvy and educated sales representatives demonstrate the value of broadband phone service to an untapped market segment."

Vonage is sold directly through their Web site and retail partners such as Amazon.com, RadioShack, Best Buy, Circuit City, Staples and Office Depot.

Last week, Vonage announced the closing of a $105 million series D financing round led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) with strong participation from 3i, Meritech Capital Partners and existing investors. This latest round of financing brings total investment in the company to $208 million.