October 2007 Archives
Not wasting any time when it comes to leveraging their recent acquisition of Switchvox, Digium today announced the availability of Switchvox Free Edition.
According to Digium VP, Bill Miller, the solution will be available for download from Digium’s Web site, starting immediately.
The company also announced the re-launch of its partner program today.
I have a full write-up here.
The private equity trend keeps rolling on...
Covad Communications Group Inc., announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by an affiliate of Platinum Equity for $1.02 per share in cash. The company’s board has reportedly unanimously approved this transaction.
The purchase price carries a 59% premium as compared to Friday’s closing price of $0.64.
The deal is expected to close by the end of the Q208.
Los Angeles, CA-based Platinum Equity is a global acquisition firm uniquely specialized in the operation of mission-critical solutions and services companies
The majority of Platinum Equity’s client lineup is the result of acquisitions made with such companies as General Electric, Vivendi Universal, Hays, CompuCom, Alcatel, Kemper Services, Motorola, Lucent Technologies, Fujitsu, AT&T, and IBM.
Platinum Equity was the firm behind the 2005 acquisition of USRobotics, the well known maker of broadband and analog modems and networking solutions.
The consolidation in the VoIP equipment market continues.
Network Equipment Technologies, Inc., announced today that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire privately held Quintum Technologies, an enterprise VoIP access switching and gateway solutions provider.
Under the terms of the agreement, NET will acquire all of the outstanding shares of Quintum for a total equity value of $41 million, comprised of $20.5 million in cash and $20.5 million in NET stock.
Siemens is introducing its latest unified communications solution, Siemens HiPath OpenOffice ME.
The solution is designed to help small to medium businesses (in this case Siemens defines SMB as the 20–150 employee space) increase productivity and efficiency by enabling them with a variety of communications, collaboration and mobility features.
Currently slated for availability in February of 2008, Siemens expects the solution to price at approximately $270 per seat, before channel discounts. Siemens is currently expanding their channel in the United States to address the market opportunity.
I had a great talk with Siemens U.S. vice president of product and service management (enterprise) Al Baker who shared the big news with me.
If you click over to my columnist page, you’ll find a full article with more information about this latest UC initiative from Siemens.
Frank Stinson of Intellicom Analytics added his voice to the chorus of analysts deciphering what Microsoft’s entry into unified communications means to the marketplace.
Here’s what Frank had to say:
“Microsoft is attempting to paint the current mainstream IP-PBX as an architectural dead-end that will soon be viewed as obsolete and inflexible as the typewriter is in comparison to a modern word processing software package. But Microsoft needs to interoperate with these solutions today to provide the enterprise-class call control features that have not been as extensively developed yet in a software-based delivery model.
“Microsoft is pursuing a Trojan horse strategy by gaining entry to the customer today based on the interoperability of OCS with their existing voice infrastructure, a particularly compelling story in mixed-vendor PBX environments. Over time, as existing installed PBXs age and Microsoft adds more robust call control features on top of OCS on a customizable basis, they clearly intend to displace core telephony solutions as well. Existing IP-PBX vendors are in a bind as a result. While they recognize to a certain extent the long term competitive threat that Microsoft poses, they are still compelled to work with them today because common customers expect it and their key traditional competitors are also partnering with Microsoft on some level.”
Art Rosenberg has been known to offer an opinion or two on the subject of unified communications, back from its earliest roots as unified messaging through to today’s all encompassing term, “transmodal communications.”
Art decided to wait a few days to let the clamor subside before offering his views on what Microsoft’s OCS launch means for SMBs and resellers too.
You can check out Art’s most recent thoughts on the subject here.
Lastly, TMCnet Featured Guest Blogger Tom Cross has posted some new content on his Cross Talk blog, that essentially amounts to an inside look at Microsoft's OCS, and Tom proimises to share much more information as we move forward. You should defintiely bookmark Tom's blog and check back regularly for updates.
Rich posted this blog over the weekend where he talks about a new venture called EnThinnai, which is essentially an “un-social networking” application whose (rather lofty) goal is to bring some order to the world of presence and managing your availability.
I urge you to check out the company, which does offer some cool, Web 2.0-like promise.
According to the company’s blog, posted by Aswath:
EnThinnai provides a simple way to store and share digital information with your friends and family, called buddies. You interact with EnThinnai via a simple unified UI to exchange with your buddies digital information like notes (think of whitelist based email), share files and contact information. At this point this description reads like any other social networking application. But EnThinnai has many differentiating features…
So I heard this rumor… and of course I have no way of substantiating it.
But I’m real curious so I call one of the major actors in this would be drama, a VP of Marketing in fact, who tells me he’s in a meeting. I ask him to comment on the rumor. He repeats that he is in a meeting and he has to go. Now.
Didn’t even say good bye.
So I go online and quickly ascertain that the Executive Chairman of one of the companies involved in this rumor is also on the Board of Directors of both companies, who are said to be merging.
The companies are said to be merging as equals.
I wish I hadn’t slept through investigative journalism 101.
I also wish it wasn’t Friday after 5pm, when no self-respecting rumor mill types are answering their phones.
I did reach a former Board member of one of the companies, who “couldn’t really comment” but noted the same thing I did, the part about the common ownership across the two companies.
So I can’t say who started this rumor, and I certainly can’t say for sure if it’s real, but if the rumor was that NexTone and ReefPoint were going to merge, and that David Walsh of One Equity Partners (the private equity investing arm of JP Morgan Chase) was on the Board of both companies as well as the acting Executive Chairman of NexTone, would that be too much of a stretch?
Reuters is reporting that MySpace and Skype are working together to offer MySpace members free Internet calling services, in a bid “to expand their base of users and revenue.”
The deal is set to be announced tomorrow.
The timing of this announcement is… well, interesting to say the least. Just this afternoon I heard rumors to the effect that Skype was working to make its voice services available to users of another social networking concern.
I’m not going to say which one, because I’m afraid someone might throw a sheep at me.
Nevertheless, the concept of converging VoIP with social networking is clearly happening. And if you ask me, it’s a good thing.
Stay tuned…
Wow. I almost feel stranded, away from the Microsoft OCS news that my colleagues are covering so admirably.
See Rich’s blog entries on the subject, Tom’s blogs and OCS 2007 product review, and the following articles from Erik, Mae, Tim, Brian, and Stefania. Stefania also covers the news of Dell diving into the Unified Communications space here.
For the complete story click here.
I’ll have more to add on this later — there’s just so much news surrounding Microsoft’s launch.
Well at last it’s finally here. The Quickening!
Ok, Ok.. now I sound like Tom with his Braveheart quotes. For those who recognize it, I was referring to the original Highlander movie…
No. What I’m really getting at is that today is the official launch of Microsoft’s OCS 2007 unified communications solution.
Much has already been written about this impending launch over the past year or so, so perhaps there will not be any real news in today’s news. However, I imagine that valuable information regarding customers, partners and the like, will indeed make the headlines today.
I’m also waiting for Tom Keating’s take on the solution. His review of OCS 2007 is set to be published later today
TMC president Rich Tehrani is actually fortunate enough to be at the launch event in san Francisco, so I can’t wait to hear his up close and personal take on the day’s events.
And of course, the TMC team will be covering all the different angles of the story as well.
I’m at the BroadSoft event in Phoenix through tomorrow, and I’ve been getting some interesting feedback (too bad most is off the record) from attendees regarding the launch. As I mentioned in yesterday’s entry, it appears there are two camps forming: the “wait and see” group and the “Microsoft’s entry into the market means a rising tide, which is good for all boats.”
I was drawn to a comment I read in old friend Dave Greenfield’s blog regarding the opportunity for Microsoft and how the software giant might fare against their would be competitors:
“As long as communications means UC and UC involves the desktop, organizations will favor Microsoft.”
And that’s a key way to view today’s news; through the eyes of the enterprise buyer. The success or failure of Microsoft’s foray into communications rests in the hands of the enterprise decision makers who choose what applications will run on their enterprise networks.
In any event, stay tuned. Today will be a busy day!
I’m out at the Broadsoft Connections conference in Phoenix, AZ and I’m trying to stay as productive as possible while meeting with senior-level executives at a number of Broadsoft’s partner companies.
The event kicked off with an introductory keynote by Broadsoft president and CEO Michael Tessler. The theme of this year’s conference, Scaling New Heights, was brought to life by a series of BMX bikers performing acrobatic feats — twists and turns and flips and jumps — on an indoor series of ramps set up for the event. Very exciting, and very fitting given Tessler’s subsequent comments.
Tessler spoke about the growth of the market, as well as the growth of the opportunity. He broke the market down for the standing room only audience, and settled on three key areas which will bear watching over the next few years.
He cited industry stats that show the potential size of the market as follows:
Hosted Voice/Hosted Applications: Infotek said that by 2010 marketplace for hosted voice and services would be $37 Billion, and the hosted voice part of that would be approximately $10B.
Business Trunking: Frost & Sullivan stated that connecting customer premise-based equipment to the network was an opportunity approaching $11B in 2006.
Residential Opportunity: Back in February, Ovum announced its view that the 2010 worldwide voice/residential opportunity would be equal to about $40 billion.
He summed up by telling the audience that the market is growing, and growing quickly. With a worldwide service provider market opportunity of roughly $88 billion by 2010, Tessler told the audience, “We’re here to help you capture a greater share of that opportunity.”
Scott Wharton, Broadsoft’s VP Marketing then came onstage to introduce the morning keynote speaker, the author, entrepreneur and Apple fellow Guy Kawasaki, who presented his address entitled The Art of Evangelism.
Kawasaki is an excellent speaker and he held the audience’s attention as he addressed his top 10 list of how to evangelize a product or idea.
I won’t go into it, but suffice it to say it was entertaining, thought provoking, and frankly a really interesting presentation, and I’m glad to have been in the audience.
One of the funnier moments came during the audience Q&A when someone asked Kawasaki what his thoughts were regarding the impending launch of Microsoft’s OCS scheduled for tomorrow. He didn’t seem to know much about the event, but then true to his Apple evangelist roots, he brushed aside the significance of tomorrow’s announcement with a comment that, “If it’s anything like Vista, then the companies in this room have nothing to worry about.”
Of course everyone laughed at the obvious partisan shot, but hey, when you’re the original evangelist for the Macintosh group at Apple, you don’t have to play nice with regards to Microsoft.
Speaking of Microsoft and their impending unified communications launch tomorrow, TMCnet editors are doing a great job of covering the buzz and the news leading up to that launch.
For more on the day’s biggest news check out the special featured section on the Unified Communications magazine home page.
Here are just a few sample headlines that are being featured on TMCnet as you read this.
I’ve been hearing some mounting buzz regarding tomorrow’s Microsoft news, and so much of the opinion is split between a “let’s wait and see what Microsoft can do” response and “It’s a really big deal when a company as large and powerful as Microsoft is, enters a market with such a big splash.”
For a sample of the type of things I’m hearing, one has to look no further than Rich Tehrani’s blog, where you have two extremes:
I’m hoping my schedule allows me to hear Bill Gates’ comments live tomorrow. In any event stay tuned through tomorrow and beyond, both to my blog and to TMCnet’s Microsoft OCS Launch coverage to learn all you need to know.
I just got back from Texas and had a great meeting with Nortel execs. We talked about SOA, and the evolution of convergence, and of course we spoke at length about unifed communications (UC). Check out my article here.
Also be sure to check out TMCnet's coverage in advance of Microsoft's official OCS launch by clicking here.
I’m visiting Dallas, Texas this week, and I was lucky enough to have a meeting with Huawei Technologies’ Edward Qian and Steve Hill at the company’s U.S. headquarters in Richardson (a suburb of Dallas).
We spoke about a number of topics, among them IMS. Qian told me that IMS is definitely one of Huawei’s major areas of focus. However, he said, IMS is a journey, and it will not happen overnight. We agreed that IMS is clearly the trend, but Qian underlined some of the issues that might hold back the rapid adoption of the technology, namely a lack of terminal readiness, a lack of standardization (standards are still in flux), and a need for wireless operators to step up the urgency with which they converge circuit-switched voice to packet-switched.
In the end, it was clear that Huawei is trying to provide and end to end ecosystem solution to their customers.
Nevertheless, Qian and Hill told us that Huawei is prepared to work with partners for various elements of their ecosystem. They cited partners like Broadsoft, Sylsntro, Leap/Cricket, Nextwave, and BT among others. The company works with multiple vendors across the entire spectrum of products, from terminals to access to core and even server, OSS, etc….
I asked them to explain why Huawei was enjoying such rapid growth. Qian pointed out several reasons:
- Senior management had the vision to go global instead of staying focused exclusively on the Chinese market.
- We are very customer focused. We work very closely with our customers in order to learn their real requirements.
- A dedicated percentage of the company’s spend goes into research and development, which translates into the ability to quickly respond to customer needs.
- Innovation: When Huawei first appeared on the global scene they were considered to be a market follower. The company continues to increase the number of patents filed and has a program in place to incentivize engineers to think creatively to solve customer problems.
Once considered a “low-cost alternative” Hill wanted me to understand that for Huawei, cost is just one element of a successful offering. “Low cost is a part of the equation,” he said, “but focus only on cost sells the customer short. They’re looking for quality. We believe that’s what we deliver.”
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