Greg Galitzine : Greg Galitzine's VoIP Authority Blog
Greg Galitzine

August 2007

You are browsing the archive for August 2007.

Interactive Intelligence Gears Up For ITEXPO

August 31, 2007

Interactive Intelligence will have a big presence at the upcoming ITEXPO in Los Angeles, CA September 10-12. The company has been very successful of late, reporting second quarter jump in revenue of 40 percent to $27 million. Profit more than doubled as sales growth outpaced expenses.   I asked Joe Staples SVP, Worldwide Marketing to describe what attendees at the ITEXPO event can expect to see from Interactive Intelligence.     GG: Please describe your presence at the upcoming ITEXPO and Call Center 2.0 events. JAS: Of the 40+ shows we do each year, ITEXPO is the biggest for us. In our booths we’ll be showing all of our primary products including those for the contact center, enterprise IP telephony, and enterprise messaging.

Open Source CRM Session Preview ITEXPO

August 29, 2007

ITEXPO is right around the corner, and the sheer variety of subjects being addressed in the conference program is pretty impressive. Take for example the subject of Open Source CRM. It’s not exactly the common fare you get at other conferences.   The session, "Open Source: Too Good to Be True?" presented by SugarCRM’s CEO and Co-founder, John Roberts, will be held on Wednesday September 12, 2007 1:45pm–2:30pm.   TMCNet’s Stefania Viscusi offers a sneak peek of the session here.   I urge you to check it out. Register here.   I look forward to seeing you in LA!    

Free Webinars From AudioCodes

August 24, 2007

AudioCodes and TMC are teaming up on a series of free Webinars addressing the IP Communications marketplace.   The first Webinar in the series — titled Break Free — Leveraging SIP in Developing Enhanced Applications — addresses the topic of developing exciting and profitable new applications using the session initiation protocol.   Over the last 15+ years, literally thousands of enhanced applications have been developed for the legacy telecommunications infrastructure. From simple voicemail, to sophisticated contact center solutions, these Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) applications have built value on top of basic PSTN dial-tone, generating substantial revenue in both products and services. However, many of the CTI applications were developed using a restrictive and hard-to-learn architecture that limits the developer’s choices in operating systems, choice of technology suppliers and incurs other serious restraints.   This Webinar outlines a migration strategy that leverages SIP to eliminate many of the past restraints and show how to “break free” from the bonds of the legacy CTI architecture.     The Webinar will be presented by AudioCodes’ Director of Business Development Alan Percy.

Nortel Helps BT Handle 1 Million Calls in a Day

August 23, 2007

It must have been a fairly busy day.   BT announced that the Department for Work and Pension’s (DWP) newly installed IP Telephony platform handled over 1,000,000 calls in a single day.   According to BT’s news release:   The Integrated Communications Network Services (ICONS) programme being implemented at the DWP is one of the largest converged data and voice networks in northern Europe. It is part of a two-year DWP IT transformation programme designed to extract the maximum value from IT in order to support the reform and delivery of public services. The DWP’s two existing networks are being replaced be a single Voice-over IP network capable of carrying data, voice and video.

Enterprise Mobility: Free White Papers

August 22, 2007

It’s no secret that mobility in the enterprise is one of today’s hottest areas of interest, as CIOs and IT teams desperately try to deliver productivity boosting applications to their employees. Enterprises need to develop thorough plans for unleashing their workers from the physical office location. Much thought must be given to security, synchronization, network management, device management, and wireless best practices that will work together to create an optimal mobile enterprise that is productive, seamless, and cost effective.   Motorola, in concert with TMCnet, has made available three white papers dealing with various elements of effectively deploying a mobile enterprise.

How Do You Spell iPhone in German?

August 22, 2007

  The word from Europe this morning, according to Informa’s Telecoms.com, is that Apple has apparently signed up three mobile operators to distribute the much heralded iPhone “across the pond.”   Citing a report in the Financial Times Deutschland, Telecoms.com reports that O2 in the UK, Orange in France, and T-Mobile in Germany, have all agreed to commence selling the iPhone later this year.      

Black Box To Sell ShoreTel VoIP Systems

August 21, 2007

ShoreTel and Black Box announced an agreement today, whereby Black Box will sell, install, and support ShoreTel’s IP telephony solutions to its large enterprise customers across the United States and Canada   The two companies have already completed several large multi-site installations at FORTUNE 1000-class enterprises.   According to Rick Gannon, regional general manager at Black Box:   “ShoreTel is a natural fit for our portfolio of products. There is a clear demand from our customers for ShoreTel’s solutions, and we are very impressed with the overall performance and reliability.”    

SightSpeed CEO on Skype

August 17, 2007

Just got a note from SightSpeed’s Peter Csathy regarding the Skype outage and the blogosphere wondering aloud of this is a P2P doomsday scenario.   Here’s Peter:   Obviously, the Skype outage is big news – and several industry pundits are now wondering if Skype’s troubles expose previously unexposed vulnerabilities to all P2P models.  This is a critical question right now because literally billions of dollars are at stake -- (eBay lost nearly $1 billion valuation in the past 48 hours alone per TechCrunch)   The answer is a critical “no” – i.e., all P2P models are NOT created equal…   Peter is inviting people to check out a blog entry written by SightSpeed CTO Aron Rosenberg, which explains the differences between the various types of P2P.   *** Ironically, I just installed Microsoft’s Office Communicator this week for IM’ing my colleagues here in the office, so I’m not really missing Skype too much.   Still I’m fairly confident that once this issue is finally completely patched up, Skype will return stronger for the experience.    

SightSpeed CEO on Skype

August 17, 2007

Just got a note from SightSpeed’s Peter Csathy regarding the Skype outage and the blogosphere wondering aloud of this is a P2P doomsday scenario.   Here’s Peter:   Obviously, the Skype outage is big news – and several industry pundits are now wondering if Skype’s troubles expose previously unexposed vulnerabilities to all P2P models.  This is a critical question right now because literally billions of dollars are at stake -- (eBay lost nearly $1 billion valuation in the past 48 hours alone per TechCrunch)   The answer is a critical “no” – i.e., all P2P models are NOT created equal…   Peter is inviting people to check out a blog entry written by SightSpeed CTO Aron Rosenberg, which explains the differences between the various types of P2P.   *** Ironically, I just installed Microsoft’s Office Communicator this week for IM’ing my colleagues here in the office, so I’m not really missing Skype too much.   Still I’m fairly confident that once this issue is finally completely patched up, Skype will return stronger for the experience.    

Latest Unified Communications Survey Results

August 16, 2007

The latest survey results are in.   Over the past few weeks we have been asking readers to share their views on a broad range of topics regarding Unified Communications. In our latest research survey conducted in partnership with IntelliCom Analytics, we wanted to see how well positioned the incumbent voice platform vendors are in terms of being the provider of choice when the enterprise decides to deploy Unified Communications.   With 505 businesses participating in the survey, the findings strongly suggest that incumbent voice platform providers should not presume that they will automatically be chosen by their customers to provide Unified Communications solutions.   For more on the findings, please check out this article.

Inter-Tel, Mitel on the Precipice

August 15, 2007

Inter-Tel today announced that the Delaware Court of Chancery has denied a shareholder motion to enjoin the acquisition of Inter-Tel by Mitel Networks Corporation. As a result of the Court’s decision, Inter-Tel and Mitel are free to move ahead with the merger. The expected close of the transaction is scheduled for tomorrow, August 16, 2007. For more on the imminent close of this merger, check out this story.

Infonetics: 80% of Providers to Offer FMC by April '08

August 13, 2007

  Infonetics has released a new study titled “Service Provider Plans for Next Gen Voice & IMS,” that shows nearly 80% of responding service providers plan to offer fixed/mobile convergence (FMC) services within 8 months.   According to the study, service providers see the two main benefits of FMC services as increasing average revenue per user and keeping traffic within the network.   “Despite the fact that 71% of the service providers we interviewed for a similar study last year expected to use IMS architecture in 2007, we cautioned that providers likely were being optimistic with their uptake plans. With this year’s study, we now have concrete evidence of IMS adoption shifting out: just over a quarter are using IMS in 2007 and less than half plan to do so in 2008,” said Stéphane Téral, principal analyst at Infonetics for service provider VoIP, IMS, and FMC.   Several other highlights from the report include:  
  • Operational expenditure saving remains an important driver to deploy IMS
  • Some providers say they will never completely migrate to next gen voice for access, Class 4, or Class 5, meaning multiple heterogeneous access networks will coexist for a long time, and full Class 5 replacement is not on the agenda
  • Main drivers for carriers adopting VoIP continue to be reducing opex, growing revenue, and adding margin-rich services, all aided by an increasing broadband penetration and the maturation of next gen voice technology
Infonetics’ study is based on formal interviews conducted by senior analysts with 24 North American, European, Asia Pacific, and Latin American-Caribbean service providers who plan to deploy next gen voice over the next year.
Featured Events