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

May 2008

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Must be the VoIP

May 29, 2008

Costco Wholesale Corp. said on Thursday its quarterly profit jumped 32 percent, beating expectations.   Net income was $295.1 million, or 67 cents per share, for the fiscal third quarter — 2 cents above the consensus analyst estimate — compared with $224.0 million, or 49 cents per share, a year earlier.   Sales in the quarter rose 13 percent to $16.26 billion, excluding membership fees, which rose to $350.9 million from $317.7 million   Some say it’s because cash strapped consumers are looking for discounts on food and gas.   I say it must be the VoIP.

Small Business VoIP at Costco

May 28, 2008

  So let me get this straight… If I want to buy an obscene amount of flour, 48 rolls of paper towels, a 100-lb bag of rice, a 300-pack of DVD-Rs, a six-year supply of shaving cream, or a two-bottle-pack of extra strength Tylenol (1,500 capsules per…) or a small business phone system, all I have to do is go to my friendly neighborhood Costco?   Apparently Syspine’s Digital Operator Phone System from Quanta Computer, featuring Microsoft Response Point phone system software, is now available for purchase at the big-box retailer.   For more, check out the story here.

SIP Forum Expands Membership

May 28, 2008

The SIP Forum recently announced significantgrowth in membership since the beginning of 2008. Currently, the SIP Forum has 46 Full Member companies and more than 5,000 individual members from around the world.   Companies that have recently joined the SIP Forum as Full Members include AudioCodes Ltd., Bandwidth.com, Cable Television Laboratories, Inc. (CableLabs), CGI Group Inc, Covergence, Dialogic Corporation, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft Corporation, NEC Unified Solutions Inc., Sonus Networks, Tekelec, and Telsis Limited.   According to Marc Robins, SIP Forum Managing Director and President of SIP Forum LLC, “The recent surge in our membership ranks is a clear signal that the work of the Forum is resonating with equipment vendors, service providers and developers of SIP-based IP communications products and services. Indeed, one of the reasons for our recent growth is the expanding support and momentum behind the SIP Forum's SIP trunking initiative called SIPconnect, which provides an industry-approved set of rules and guidelines for accomplishing trouble-free, direct IP peering between SIP-enabled IP-PBXs and SIP-enabled VoIP service providers.”   The organization’s mission is “To advance the adoption of products and services based on SIP.”   The Forum promotes SIP as the technology of choice for the control of real-time multimedia communication sessions throughout the Internet, corporate networks, and wireless networks.   Visit them online at SIPForum.org    

Vapps Rebranding Hi-Def Conferencing Service

May 19, 2008

Hoboken, NJ-based Vapps, Inc. has announced it is undergoing a bit of rebranding, and will use the term High-Definition Conferencing to describe the high-quality wideband audio fidelity of its audio conferences using Skype. High-Definition Conferencing replaces Vapps’ previous brand, High-Speed Conferencing, effective immediately.   By leveraging the wideband audio protocols available today, whether GIPS or wideband AMR codecs, Vapps believes they can offer the highest quality audio conferencing service available.   I caught up with Vapps at The Cable Show this week, and spoke with John Bennett, the company’s senior vice president who explained that the cable space is new territory for Vapps.   Bennett told me that business services such as the Vapps conferencing service can help cable providers offer their customers a wider variety of compelling applications.   The company also unveiled a brand-new Web site for users to gather more information on High-Definition Conferencing: www.hidefconferencing.com.   Vapps recently announced that automotive replacement parts retailer AutoZone selected Vapps’ Conferencing Enterprise service as the internal audio conferencing service for more than 4,000 retail AutoZone locations.

Nortel's LTE Patent Licensing Play

May 8, 2008

Last month a group of vendors agreed to commit to a licensing framework, whereby they would license their patents relating to the next-generation wireless technology LTE, or Long-Term Evolution, according to “fair and reasonable” terms.   Long-Term Evolution is a 3GPP (third-generation partnership project) effort to enhance the next generation of UMTS with regard to cost, services, spectrum usage and interoperability.   The technology is designed to speed up network data transfer rates, enabling for example, faster video streaming, photo sharing, and music downloading.   The group which includes the likes of Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, NEC, NextWave Wireless, Nokia, Nokia Siemens Networks, and Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications most notably does not include Qualcomm, which earlier this year announced plans to develop LTE chipsets.   Now, in a move they hope will accelerate the global adoption of LTE by service providers, handset manufacturers and end-users, Nortel has announced a competitive royalty rate for its standards-essential patent claims for LTE handsets.   In a statement, Nortel said they will “license its LTE standards essential patent claims for LTE handsets at a royalty rate for approximately 1%, subject to reciprocity, defensive suspension, and grantback to Nortel products, services, and solutions, as well as other customary license terms and conditions.”   Nortel hopes that by publishing its patent royalty rates it will provide “increased transparency and predictability of IPR costs” which would eliminate any cost uncertainties in handset costs from stunting the adoption and growth of technologies like LTE.

WSJ Rumor: Sprint to T-Mobile?

May 5, 2008

A report in The Wall St. Journal has Sprint Nextel Corp. as a takeover candidate, with Germany’s T-Mobile a prime candidate to pull off the deal.   If the deal were to go through, it would make T-Mobile the largest U.S. cellular carrier, vaulting it past AT&T and Verizon Wireless to the number one spot.   While it does make for interesting speculation, let’s not get worked up over it yet. Rumors such as these are what fuels Wall Street, and The Journal said deliberations were at "a preliminary stage and management may very well turn away," and cited sources as saying the arrangement, "could still be weeks, or even months away."   The rumored deal does make sense on several levels, and with the Euro so strong against the dollar, it might simply amount to be too good a deal for Germany’s T-Mobile to pass up on the opportunity to purchase Sprint Nextel’s spectrum and 50 million+ customers.   As they say, watch this space…

WSJ Rumor: Sprint to T-Mobile?

May 5, 2008

A report in The Wall St. Journal has Sprint Nextel Corp. as a takeover candidate, with Germany’s T-Mobile a prime candidate to pull off the deal.   If the deal were to go through, it would make T-Mobile the largest U.S. cellular carrier, vaulting it past AT&T and Verizon Wireless to the number one spot.   While it does make for interesting speculation, let’s not get worked up over it yet. Rumors such as these are what fuels Wall Street, and The Journal said deliberations were at "a preliminary stage and management may very well turn away," and cited sources as saying the arrangement, "could still be weeks, or even months away."   The rumored deal does make sense on several levels, and with the Euro so strong against the dollar, it might simply amount to be too good a deal for Germany’s T-Mobile to pass up on the opportunity to purchase Sprint Nextel’s spectrum and 50 million+ customers.   As they say, watch this space…

Foundry at Interop: New Modules, Green Award

May 1, 2008

I had the opportunity to meet with Foundry Networks at Interop this week, to discuss their latest offerings, a pair of high-density interface modules to its data center switching and routing product lines, the BigIron RX Series switches and the NetIron MLX Series routers.   The new modules will reportedly allow the BigIron RX Series switches and the NetIron MLX Series routers to deliver the industry’s highest 10 gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) and gigabit Ethernet (GbE) density of up to 512 ports of 10GbE and 1,536 ports of GbE in a single system.       The news of the new modules came on the heels of Foundry’s announcement of a new vision for advancing the data center based upon four key pillars: performance, virtualization, convergence and efficiency.   Foundry also was awarded the first-ever Interop Green Award. According to a release on Foundry’s site, the company was “…singled out for its ability to deliver industry-leading performance while minimizing power, space and cooling consumption in its switching, routing and application delivery controller (ADC) product set and solutions.

Interop: Shunra Makes News

May 1, 2008

I had some more good meetings today at Interop, among them a chat with Shunra Software’s Rhoan Morgan and David Berg. Check out this article on Shunra’s newest announcement regarding version 5.30 of the Shunra Virtual Enterprise (VE) Suite

Interop: XO Expands US Footprint

May 1, 2008

XO Communications announced today that they have significantly expanded their nationwide Ethernet services footprint.   In a briefing at Interop today, I spoke with XO’s Brad Boddicker, regional vice president for the company’s Western region, and he told me that XO is now capable of empowering over half a million business locations in 75 major metropolitan areas across the United States with next-generation Ethernet services.   Boddicker also mentioned that XO can deliver via a number of different vehicles as well, including fiber, Ethernet over copper, and fixed broadband wireless capabilities.   The company has been doing a number of interesting things lately, including the launch in April of XO Anywhere, a service designed to improve worker productivity with mobility and unified communications features. The service enables employees to use any device as their XO office phone, which is a real benefit for companies with large mobile and distributed workforces.  
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