January 2006 Archives

Stop me if you've heard this one...

A guy is driving around the back woods and he sees a sign in front of a house:

“Talking Dog for Sale.”

He rings the bell and the owner tells him the dog is in the backyard. The guy goes into the backyard and sees a Labrador retriever sitting there.

“You talk?” he asks.

“Yep,” the Lab replies.

“So, what’s your story?”

The Lab looks up and says, “Well, I discovered that I could talk when I was pretty young. I wanted to help the government, so I told the CIA about my gift, and in no time at all they had me jetting from country to country, sitting in rooms with spies and world leaders, because no one figured a dog would be eavesdropping. I was one of their most valuable spies for eight years running.”

“But the jetting around really tired me out, and I knew I wasn’t getting any younger so I decided to settle down. I signed up for a job at the airport to do some undercover security wandering near suspicious characters and listening in.

“I uncovered some incredible dealings and was awarded a batch of medals. I got married, had a mess of puppies, and now I’m just retired”

The guy is amazed. He goes back in and asks the owner what he wants for the dog.

“Ten dollars,” the guy says.

“Ten dollars? This dog is amazing. Why on earth are you selling him so cheap?”

“Because he’s a liar. He never did any of that stuff.”

Google just became a phone company. Or bought one. Or both... Or... In any event, check out what TMC's Robert Liu has to say on the matter.

http://news.tmcnet.com/news/-voip-inc-google-stock-soars-/2006/01/30/1325758.htm

The Thursday morning keynote featured a presentation from Richard Tworek, vice president of Enterprise Communication Servers at Nortel.

Tworek addressed the assembly with a keynote entitled enhancing the human experience with enterprise real-time secure converged communications.

Reminiscing on the history of the industry, Tworek recalled that we have passed through several revolutions since the early days of 1998-99.

Tworek is a self admitted technophile and a classic early adopter. During the first “revolution,” Tworek had downloaded some software and attempted to call a friend in Virginia from his home in Maryland. Of course it took some time and lots of effort and configuration and reconfiguration sending e-mail back and forth until his wife finally asked, “Why don’t you just pick up the phone?”

The second revolution consisted of a so-called arms race, where bits and bytes, feeds and speeds, my phone works better than your phone were the order of the day.

Revolution number three is current: “What are we concerned about today?” In Tworek’s view, the ‘Top 3 Technology Initiatives for 2006’ include Security, Open Standards, and Personal Communications (any where, any time). “It’s really about enhancing the user experience,” he said.

He expanded on the theme and noted that the only consistent thing over the three revolutions is business. The needs of business haven’t changed. Businesses need to optimize investments. Businesses need to save time and money. Businesses need to save and protect company assets. Businesses need to simplify.

Tworek described the fundamental disruptions transforming today’s telecom industry:

Demand for employee mobility.

The need for security

IP Convergence

Consumerization of I.T.

Drilling down on the top three technology initiatives, Tworek pointed out the drivers for — and advantages of — the three factors.

Security

Drivers include an increase in mixed media on networks; and an increasingly distributed workforce demanding more attention to security. The real value to the enterprise lies in risk mitigation, protection and recovery of information and elimination of productivity loss.

Open Systems

Open systems, specifically SIP-based systems are being driven by user diversity, a desire for flexible choices when choosing platforms and devices, the potential to be a disruptive technology. Advantages of using open systems include adaptive client and application choice, streamlined business processes, increased customer responsiveness, and increased productivity.

Personal Communications

Regarding personal communications, Tworek shared his view that the drivers are technology consumerization, and an increasingly virtual and mobile workforce. The advantage of embracing personal communications includes simplicity, time to decision making, and the ability to conduct business without boundaries.

Tworek thanked the audience and closed with the following observation regarding revolution four, “Innovation is executing on creativity.”

Wednesday evening’s keynotes kicked off with a presentation from Brian Dal Bello, Director, Product Marketing IP Communication Business Unit Voice Technology Group, Cisco Systems.

Dal Bello spoke to the crowd about the impact of VoIP in a keynote entitled Business Communications: The Challenge.

The keynote began with a look at some of  the trends that are happening in the VoIP industry.

* 54 Million Skype downloads as of September 2005

* In Denmark, VoIP minutes are greater than landline voice minutes

* Six Million U.S. homes will move to VoIP in 2006 (USA Today)

* 1.1 Trillion SMS messages were sent resulting in $50B worth of revenue in 2004 (Informa)

* More e-mails are sent in Japan via mobile than via PC (DoCoMo).

* By 2006 there will be 200 million corporate IM users (IDC)

Dal Bello discussed some of the challenges inherent in business communications. Where am I? There are so many locations (office, home office, traveling…) There are so many devices… so many ways to communicate that it becomes difficult to even  know where to begin.

Dal Bello went on to say that there is very high complexity in communications today, but there is also a lot of information in the network that could facilitate communications if applied correctly.

The intensity too is increasing continued Dal Bello. There are so many messages, coming at us in so many different modes (IM, cell, e-mail…), and that large volume can only lead to inefficiency if all of these different communications were to be dealt with.

Dal Bello also discussed the velocity of communications, and pointed out the potential pitfalls if communications cannot keep up with the ever increasing speed of business.

Ineffective communications has a tangible impact on business, resulting in project delays and work slowdown. The impact of good communication is a rise in productivity and a shortened production cycle. Improved internal communication results in increased employee satisfaction and morale, and a concomitant increase in customer satisfaction.

The goal is seamless mobility allowing business users to easily move from one application to another, and maintain access to people and resources in real time. Through presence and increased mobility we need to rethink business communications.

The second keynoter of Wednesday’s lineup was Myrle McNeal, Senior Vice President of Local VoIP Services for Level 3 Communications. McNeal has responsibility for P&L, operations performance and marketing strategy for the company’s Voice over IP portfolio including (3)VoIP Enhanced Local, Local Inbound and E911 Direct services.

McNeal spoke about marketing VoIP services to consumers. He started with some background on what Level3 sees happening with the marketing of VoIP services and what we will need to do to accelerate the acceptance of VoIP services.

“Awareness is happening,” he said, “yet there’s still work that needs to be done to make everyone aware of VoIP. We’re just starting to move the mark, but the prospect for significant growth is higher then ever.”

Level 3 recently conducted some research on the VoIP market. Only 50% of small businesses are currently exploring VoIP, but of the ones who adopt, 75% are extremely satisfied with their choice.

Various research points to the market growing from $3B to $20B over the next 5-7 years. The bottom line is that 2006 is the beginning of the hockey stick, according to McNeal’s numbers, and consumers will continue to adopt VoIP in ever greater numbers. Jupiter research believes we will hit 20.4 million subs by 2010.

Level 3 did some research on consumer VoIP awareness and found that 60% of respondents say they have never heard of VoIP. Yet after hearing a description of VoIP the number who would consider moving was surprisingly high. 71% said they would be interested in switching once they knew what it was.

In Phase 2 research they found that unaided awareness of VoIP grew somewhat but the familiarity barely budged. More people had heard of it perhaps, but still were somewhat uncertain as to what it was. And in the mass market interest in switching remains flat: 70% of people are satisfied with their current service.

The research showed that the Top 5 reasons for not switching to VoIP include:

•           Already satisfied with current service;

•           Never received a special offer to switch;

•           Don’t know the cost of the new service;

•           Not familiar with who sells the service; and

•           Concerns with the quality/reliability of VoIP.

McNeal pointed out that, “There’s no natural decision point to force a change in telecommunications habits, and price is usually not enough. Compelling offers must address key consumer needs.”

He went on to list some of the specific needs that consumers have:

•           Offer Reliability (guarantee, pay to switch back, cancel at any time)

•           Counter short term risk (up front free period or item, get paid to use.)

•           Long term value (tenure rewards/loyalty benefits)

McNeal prodded the marketers in the audience to remember … For consumers, don’t forget the basics of a VoIP offering. These factors should include: Product, Price, Distribution, and Promotion.

Level 3’s research found that the Top 5 offers that moved consumers to consider a move to VoIP

1.)        Sign up for VoIP and get one or more other communications services for a year.

2.)        Sign up for VoIP and get something of perceived high value free each month for a year. (i.e., gas cards…)

3.)        Sign up and get six months of service for free

4.)        Sign up and get your choice of a free gift with purchase of a long-term plan

Wednesday morning, and the cavalcade of compelling keynotes continues. This morning’s session began with Avaya’s Lawrence Byrd. Lawrence is Director of IP Telephony and Mobility Solutions, Avaya, and helps drive the definition and communication of Avaya’s solution strategy.

Byrd spoke of the ongoing Evolution in communications and how it affects everyone, be it vendors, developers, customers, consumers, etc… and how telecommunications has been a force for market transformation throughout history.

He gave some specific examples, such as:

* The telegraph’s impact on transportation;

* The stock ticker’s impact on capital markets;

* The telephone’s impact on mass production (specifically as a supply chain facilitator); and

* IP Telephony’s impact on…?

What will the impact of IP telephony be?

Paraphrasing from Thomas Frideman’s book "The World is Flat," Byrd pointed out that... "the introduction of new technology alone is never enough. The spurts in productivity come when a new technology comes along, and is combined with new ways of doing business."

Byrd went on to tell that audience that there is a dividing line between two camps regarding VoIP. There’s the camp that sees VoIP as simply facilitating the way we’ve always done things and then there’s those who look to VoIP to rethink the way we do business, and "to fundamentally change things going forward."

With eight percent of global enterprise telephony lines utilizing IP in 2004 (Byrd said that Avaya’s 2005 numbers were not yet released, but probably would be around 10-12% IP) moving to 35 percent of all lines being IP by 2008 the projection is for a CAGR of 47%.

"We are at the beginning of the road," Byrd said. "In order to grow we need to change the way we approach the way we do business."

We already work differently, through telecommuting, virtual offices, home offices, and we are of course increasingly mobile. IP Telephony can facilitate the bringing together of these various modes of communicating.

Continuing on a common thread across many of the speeches here at the show, Byrd went on to say that we need to look to convergence, for having multiple e-mail stores, office voice mail, home voice mail, cell voice mail,… etc… is really unacceptable. Integration, convergence, that’s where we are headed.

We are witnessing the evolution to intelligent communications with TDM moving to IP moving to SIP, or otherwise stated, traditional communications moving to converged communications (offering cost reduction and operational efficiency) moving to communications embedded within the fabric of our business (offering business agility competitive differentiation, and customer loyalty). How does all of this help us with our customers, asked Byrd. Communications has to make this work better.

He gave a great example of an insurance company that rather than missing calls and losing money, can utilize IP telephony to link together various resources, leveraging the power of IP to bring assets together, bringing resolution to the customer’s requests/needs.

Human latency slows processes, but IP telephony-based communications integrated into the way we run our businesses can help to speed up the process.

The real challenge, Byrd said inclosing is this: "How on earth do we get from here to there? We must take practical evolutionary steps, leverage existing infrastructure and investment, while adding on mobility, presence, collaboration, and video. And we can’t forget security, high availability, open standards, and of course business process integration."

A joint initiative comprised of UPC Netherlands, Casema, MultiKabel, Essent and CaiW, totaling more than 7 million subscribers with more than 450,000 telephony subscribers - today awarded the VoIP Peering contract to a partnership of XConnect, the world's largest provider of "Plug and Peer" Voice over IP (VoIP) interconnection services and Kayote Networks, a leading provider of interconnectivity solutions for routing and peering. This landmark agreement enables all participating operators to share VoIP traffic directly over their IP networks, completely bypassing traditional phone networks and thereby eliminating PSTN interconnection fees.

Eli Katz, founder & CEO of Xconnect is speaking at Internet Telephony Conference & EXPO tomorrow during the VoIP Summit.

"This groundbreaking deal is a momentous event highlighting the tremendous impact VoIP is having on the paradigms and business models of today's telecommunications," said Katz. "With one of the most highly saturated cable marketplaces, providing services to almost 97% of Dutch homes, the Netherlands is an excellent pioneer for driving the world's first cable VoIP Exchange, and we are honored to have been selected to lead this esteemed group of operators in connecting their subscribers' calls."

For more on this news check out http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2006/01/25/1313180.htm.

What does this mean? It means that now, every cable MSO in the Netherlands can pass traffic back and forth among each other, with the key fact that these calls will never have to touch the PSTN. Between all the MSOs they probably pass most if not all the Dutch consumers -- it's a dark day for traditional Dutch phone operators.

I wonder f this will now speed any results from the CableLabs RFI. I would love to see Cablevision, Cox, Comcast et al gather together to peer their VoIP traffic. I guess for now we wait and see, and look to XConnect to see how this all plays out.

I'm dreaming of VoIP Peering. As I get set to turn in for the night, I get the sense that we may be hearing some big VoIP Peering news soon. For those of you who happen to stumble across my blog late this night, I wish you sweet dreams of VoIP and VoIP Peering.

This is Greg Galitzine saying good night.

Good night.

Tuesday evening’s keynoters represent a vast cross section of the industry. AT&T, arguably the most recognizable carrier in the world, Pingtel, a provider of open source SIP-based PBX technology, and General Motors, a behemoth enterprise consumer of telephony services.

As I sit here waiting for them to begin their discussions I am struck by the variety of keynoters and the variety of conference attendees. I guess it remains as true today as it was when we began publishing Internet Telephony magazine and putting on the Internet Telephony Conference & EXPO events: Magazine readership helps drive the attendance to the conferences. And so long as we serve a cross section of the industry with the industry’s number 1 magazine, we will continue to attract a cross-section of attendees to the events as well.

On to the keynotes…

Eric Shepcaro, AT&T

Eric Shepcaro led off the afternoon session. Shepcaro is Vice President of Business Strategy and Development at AT&T, serving as AT&T’s chief strategist.

Shepcaro led off with a very lighthearted — and well done — three-minute video where the protagonist asked a number of New York City denizens the following two questions: ‘Do you know what the term IP is?’ and ‘Do you know what the term VoIP is?’

Apparently in NYC, nobody knows what VoIP is, save for one elderly woman. Obviously the video was a lighthearted stab at the need for further education.

As for a more realistic look at adoption of VoIP, Shepcaro asked, “Why now? The pieces are clearly coming together, he said. “Over the last five years, we’ve seen lots of hype, but now we’re seeing deployments, driven in part by broadband penetration.”

He presented some statistics to support his position. One slide showed 63% broadband penetration in the U.S. Of course it could and should be more, but it’s certainly helping drive VoIP and convergence. Another stat showed that 53% of U.S. households subscribing to VoIP services have completely replaced their landline phones.

And, cost savings remains the key driver. The ability to simplify and improve voice communications are a close second. In third, come the applications: Collaboration, Unified Communications, IP Video, Audio Conferencing… these are all applications driving customers towards VoIP.

“Web services and service oriented architecture WILL define collaboration,” said Shepcaro. “It’s unacceptable today to offer standalone voice services. It is unacceptable to have my voice mail stored separately from my e-mail, forcing me to check it in several different places.”

Some of the salient points of Shepcaro’s speech all dealt with the same concept: Services over IP, or as he referred to it: XoIP, for all things over IP.

Here are some “soundbites” from Shepcaro’s speech:

“AT&T is delivering the “dynamic IT environment.”

“AT&T is trialing WiMAX, we think it has explosive opportunity.”

“Security has to be built in at every layer of convergence.”

“Convergence is starting to deliver the benefits that customers are starting to expect.”

Bill Rich, Pingtel

Next up onto the stage was Bill Rich of Pingtel.

The first words from the president and chief executive officer of Pingtel, were this: “VoIP is here. And for that, everyone in the audience should give themselves a round of applause.”

But what’s next?

Open source PBX… IM + VoIP + Presence… Fixed-Mobile Convergence…

“And so,” Rich asked, “With all that on our plates, why do we need a next anyway?”

He expanded on the theme. Communications is no longer about the phone: It’s about integration, collaboration, mobility, and an expanding plethora of means and modes of communications. But it also creates a plethora of headaches, and further Balkanization of communications.

Well, if as Rich began, “VoIP is here,” then we must recognize that at the heart of enterprise communications today is the IP PBX.

Of course, the advent of the IP PBX has its merits and its drawbacks. IP PBXs cut transportation costs and reduce MAC costs. Yes, that’s true, and that’s good. But the IP PBX has yet to show truly meaningful gains in productivity and improved usability as of yet. While that may be the goal, we have not achieved it quite yet.

So again, what’s next? Rich believes that, “What’s next is Internet Telephony, where VoIP and real-time communications start to look like e-mail.

“We move from islands of proprietary hardware as expensive and inflexible as TDM,” he continued, “towards ubiquitous and global reach, where plug and play is the norm, not the exception, and of course, integrated into the Internet.”

According to Rich, “A SIP-centric architecture provides the mechanism that enables communications to evolve from islands to an integrated community, i.e., the Internet. Presence must also play a role in the next generation of communications.”

“If you think about where VoIP wanted to go 5 or 7 years ago, we had one vision, and what we got instead was a rehash of the PBX to some degree. Open source can drive Internet Telephony to grow free from vendor constraints and the traditional PBX mindset that pervades how we think about enterprise communications.”

Rich concluded, “The market is coalescing around session-based services and SIP and that’s what we at Pingtel believe is ‘what’s next.’”

Elliott Zeltzer, General Motors

Elliott Zeltzer is the Global Manager of Global Converged Telecommunications Services for General Motors. In that role, he is responsible for Telecommunications Architecture Infrastructure, as well as for the design, build, and operation of the converged Global Network.

Zeltzer took to the stage in order to share with the audience how converged services and technology plays out at GM ina presentation entitled Transformation Of It Services And Converged Telecom. For certain, the company is huge. A truly global player, GM has resources in nearly every country in the world. And this of course presents a series of challenges regarding telecommunications

On the road to standardization, GM went from 7,000 legacy systems to 3,000 systems, which included everything from CAD systems, a common employee portal, and a common desktop environment.

GM is constantly looking to improve business processes and there is a need to stick to the mandate of “No IT dollars wasted. No technology for technology’s sake.” Zeltzer mentioned that GM has been able to improve productivity and drive quality up, all part of the company’s overall business transformation. This comprises lots of different areas of concern such as outsourcing all IT needs to third parties, yet helping them to break down barriers between disparate islands within the company. In order to test the effectiveness of the technology that Zeltzer and his team bring to GM, they need to measure their performance through a variety of metrics.

So what then is the value of convergence? Given his responsibility to GM, Zeltzer has to ask, “How do we create value to the business?” And those answers absolutely need to include Innovation; Driving the cost out of the business; and Improving productivity.

GM is slowly moving to VoIP, waiting to see how others take their lumps first. Among other things, they feel that the demands of their customer base for predictable levels of quality are precluding the company from diving into VoIP with both feet. Still, video conferencing, distance learning, and other such applications are driving GM to try and wring the cost out of the business by switching to a converged network.

Zeltzer told the crowd that unified messaging, directories, desktop collaboration, and multiple media(s) of communications are the primary applications that GM is looking at as they continue their move towards convergence. But of course QoS is critical to making sure the applications are reliable and predictable. And certainly, security is one area where service providers absolutely have to deliver. The move to convergence simply cannot expose the network to threats of any kind.

Mark Spencer kicked off the 13^th Internet Telephony Conference & EXPO today with a keynote speech entitled “Digium Got Punk’d.”

Rich Tehrani, TMC president and Conference Chairman welcomed the crowd and introduced the show’s first keynoter. Spencer is founder and president of Huntsville, Alabama-based Digium, the creator and primary developer of Asterisk, the Open Source PBX.

Dressed in a bright orange Asterisk polo shirt — a nod to his developer roots — Mark spoke to the assembled crowd and told them a story about how Digium got “Punk’d” and was forced into using VoIP more than they had originally planned.

“Digium is an unconventional company,” he said, “yet even as an unconventional company, we actually use VoIP in rather conventional ways.” He explained how the Digium phone network is really a worst case ‘don’t-try-this-at-home’ (or at work) network running absolutely every latest, bleeding-edge technology utilizing every standard known to man ( and then some) and so on and so on… “Since we’re a company of engineers,” Mark said, “our network has no redundancy, no load balancing, etc… in order to truly test the network. If mistakes happen, it happens here first.”

One day something happened that changed things, forcing digium into a more exciting use of VoIP. A customer service rep received several strange calls from people getting e-mail messages telling them to call in and dial extension 6026 for an “urgent message.”

They quickly rerouted the extension to the customer service rep, to see what was going on. The phone starts ringing off the hook, probably over 100 calls in 20 minutes. Most people hung up, but one person finally explained what was happening. The caller said he had received a message from his daughter who said to call her back at this extension.

It was a very funny message, with an IVR voice telling the caller that they have no chance of ever getting their call picked up. "Hang up now," the voice says. Go back to your life, spend time with your family, etc…

Very funny stuff.

Of course, there was a serious side effect to all of this. All of the calls came in on the Digum toll free line, eating up all their bandwidth, making it difficult for legitimate customers to reach the company. So like a conventional company facing a conventional denial of service problem, Digium was forced to call their provider, and asked them to send the toll-free calls over IP.

So at the end of the day, the calls were rerouted over VoIP and VoIP saved the day. The quality was so good that Digium decided to keep the toll-free calls coming in over IP

“I guess the lesson learned, is that you simply need to have faith in the stuff you create.”

One interesting note: at the very outset of the speech, Mark asked the audience who had heard of asterisk. To this reporter it appeared that over 90% of the crowd raised their hands. What struck me as interesting was that when Mark asked the second question — Who has already deployed Asterisk? — an incredible 45% (my estimate) raised their hands.

It just shows that open source is definitely making inroads into the telecom space.

It's 34 degrees in New York.

It's 34 degrees in Boston.

It's 34 degrees in Chicago.

It's 73 degrees and sunny in Ft. Lauderdale.

If that's not enough of a reason to come down here, today is also the opening day of  INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference & EXPO East. Final preparations are underway as we get set for a week of VoIP at what promises to be the largest VoIP event ever.

Things get rolling at 11:30 this morning with a keynote address by Mark Spencer of Digium.

I look forward to hearing what Mark has to say, and I'm really excited about the week ahead. Don't miss out. If you haven't yet done so, get yourselves down to Ft. Lauderdale now.

The forecast is very promising indeed.

NetCentrex, a leading player in the Triple Play space announced the appointment of industry veteran David Michaud as the new CEO of Netcentrex, Inc. effective today.

Mr. Michaud brings almost 25 years of telecommunications experience, a proven track record of establishing new telecom companies, and extensive experience accelerating their growth. In fact his resume reads like a who’s who of companies that have had an impact on the success of our industry: Carrius, NexTone Communications, Taqua Systems, Tekelec, Excel Communications, Lucent Technologies... His career also includes positions at DSC Communications, AT&T Bell Labs, Southwestern Bell, and IBM.

Michaud replaces Alain Fernando-Santana who is leaving to pursue other industry opportunities. We’ll certainly be hearing from him again soon.

I spoke briefly with NetCentrex VP of Marketing Brian Mahony, who told me that the change at the top does not automatically mean radical changes at the company. In fact, the focus will remain on expanding sales and making the most of the current market opportunity.

Brian told me to watch out for some upcoming customer announcements, which quite possibly will be made at the upcoming Internet Telephony Conference & EXPO in Ft. Lauderdale later this month.

Brian will be keynoting the event as one of the featured speakers on Friday January 27th and will be participating in a must-attend panel on The Current State of IPTV on Wednesday afternoon (1/25).

In other news, NetCentrex announced its expansion in the U.S. with the opening of an East Coast office in the Boston area. Mr. Michaud will be staffing the Massachusetts office and the pan is to expand the team with top industry talent in the coming months.