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Shoretel, Mitel, All's Well That Ends Well

May 7, 2009 4:30 PM

A colleague sent me this item today:

ShoreTel and Mitel Announce Cross-License and Settlement

Companies Resolve Lawsuits Filed in 2007

ShoreTel, Inc., a leading provider of Pure IP Unified Communications (UC) solutions, and Mitel, the trusted provider of unified communications, today announced a settlement ending the legal disputes between the two companies.

Under the terms of the settlement, ShoreTel and Mitel agreed to dismiss the lawsuits against each other, and entered into a cross-license of the patents at issue in the litigation. Other terms of the settlement are confidential.

TMC's Tom Keating referenced that legal action in his blog back in June 2007. And a month later, in July 2007, TMCnet editors were still on the case covering the evolving story, countersuits and all.

Well it looks like things have finally been resolved.

All's well that ends well.

The Web: The Best is Yet to Come

April 23, 2009 10:51 AM

If you think the Internet's a crowded place today, guess what? One of the Internets founders (insert Al Gore jokes here) Tim Berners-Lee, keynoting at the 18^th Annual World Wide Web conference in Madrid this week, believes that the best of the Internet is yet to come.

"The Web as I envisaged it, we have not seen it yet. The future is still so much bigger than the past," he said.

The ITU report, Measuring the Information Society, The ICT Development Index, finds that only 23% of the global population currently uses the Internet, as compared to over 60% of the world's population that is currently subscribing to mobile cellular phone services.

An article on Breitbart quotes Internet co-founder Vinton Cerf who says, "We will have more Internet, larger numbers of users, more mobile access, more speed, more things online and more appliances we can control over the Internet."

I for one, think we all can agree that the future of the Web is mobile. As smartphones proliferate and becomes less expensive; as next-generation wireless networks bring Internet access into every far-flung corner of the globe; as more people are able to get access to more information, we will see the truly transformational power of the Internet facilitate a freer exchange of ideas, resulting in new advances in technology, society, etc...

Now if only we can do away with e-Mail spam...

eBay Looks to Spin Off Skype

April 15, 2009 7:27 AM

eBay has let it be known that they are looking to spin off Skype, the Internet phone company by way of public offering.

Nearly 4 years after it acquired Skype for $2.6 billion, eBay has come to terms with the fact that it might not have made the right call with the purchase.

I never did get the marriage of the two companies, but I guess at the time, a $3 billion risk was nothing to worry about.

I came across the following prediction (based on a JP Morgan analyst's note) on the Business Insider:

JPMorgan analyst Imran Khan estimates that Skype's 2010 net revenue could reach $740 million, with EBITDA of roughly $156 million. At a 10-20X EBITDA multiple, that suggests Skype could be worth $1.6 billion to $3.1 billion as a standalone company, Khan says.

$3.1 billion? I have to wonder if they'll ever get that much for Skype.

Still, the company does have a lot to offer. With over 400 million users, Skype is the world's leading Internet phone service, and they did just release a version of Skype for the iPhone and for Blackberry too.

They've picked Goldman Sachs to manage the IPO.

Rich offers his thoughts about the potential IPO of Skype.

I agree with Rich -- this should be an interesting IPO to watch. Not only for what it might mean for tech IPOs in general, but to see if the new Wall Street has the stomach for VoIP.

Nuance Mobile Care Enhances User Experience

April 2, 2009 1:00 PM

I'm at CTIA in Las Vegas today, where I just had a meeting with Nuance senior product manager David Winarsky, who shared his insights into Nuance's latest offering Nuance Mobile Care.

The solution gives end users the ability to self-solve simple problems including customer care and billing directly and instantly on their handset thus eliminating wait times for customer service agents, and allowing customers to help themselves.

Winarsky told me that this creates a large opportunity for service providers to reduce costs and provide a superior customer experience.

Deploying the Nuance Mobile Care solution has reportedly been shown to reduce calls being directed to live agents by over sixty percent. Winarsky cited a statistic that a miniscule shift of just 1% to automation can save large carriers $1 million per month.

He showed me a demo of the solution on a Nokia N-series phone, and walked me through the different options for account management, visual IVR, ease of navigation and the ability to display complex details on the handset.

Subscribers can choose which channel (speech, text...) is best for self service and they can always zero out to an operator

The application also does some diagnostics, helping users determine if there are problems with the device.

One interesting opportunity is that service providers can use this application to send consumers targeted advertisements, and fulfillment takes place right on the device, which is another incredible revenue opportunity for the operators.

The solution is currently deployed with T-Mobile in the U.S. (postpaid) and Metro PCS (prepaid); and with Vodafone in the UK (with a contract to expand to 18 other operators in Europe).

Looking ahead, Nuance plans to add personalization and by continue to enhance the user experience. And while they are addressing wireless carriers today, Winarsky tells me that there are plans in the works to target the enterprise market down the road.

IBM Unveils Solutions and Partners Around Sametime Unified Telephony

April 1, 2009 12:01 AM

IBM heralded the future of enterprise voice collaboration today with a series of announcements addressing new software, new services and an array of business partner offerings.

IBM Lotus Sametime Unified Telephony lies at the center of the company's UC strategy.

As more vendors look to IBM as a partner, IBM took the wraps off an interoperability validation program for the product. This program is designed for IBM and key business partners to test a product's capabilities with Sametime Unified Telephony.

Participants in the Sametime Unified Telephony Validation Program include, IP PBX service providers Alcatel Lucent, Avaya, Cisco, NEC, Nortel, Mitel and Siemens, media gateway vendors Dialogic and NET, and enhanced voice quality providers GN Netcom, Plantronics, Polycom and Psytechnics. Additional partners will be announced in the coming months.

IBM also announced the availability of IBM Converged Communications Services for Sametime Unified Telephony (SUT) a new service designed specifically to enable clients to readily reap the benefits of SUT. According to IBM, the service provides strategy, assessment, architecture, design, integration and implementation for the new solution.

ADTRAN Launches Alliance Program; Targets SMB

March 31, 2009 11:17 AM

Building on their recent momentum and looking to leverage the best of what the market has to offer, ADTRAN today announced d the ADTRAN Alliance Program, a collaboration between ADTRAN and a number of best-in-breed technology and service providers delivering solutions centered on the NetVanta 7000 converged IP PBX.

This first phase of the Alliance Program features both IP telephony (IPT) technology partners and SIP trunking service providers. In order to be considered for the program, vendors and service providers must have completed an interoperability certification program proving that their services or solutions complement ADTRAN's NetVanta 7000.

"With a network-wide view of our customers' issues and challenges, we created the ADTRAN Alliance Program to help identify leading technology and service providers that are particularly well equipped to address the key needs of SMBs," said Chris Thompson, senior product manager, ADTRAN.

IP Telephony Technology Partners offer innovative solutions that have been strategically chosen to address specific applications in conjunction with the NetVanta 7000 Series. These best-in-breed partners include:

CounterPath

Incendonet

LifeSize Communications

Multi-Tech

Polycom

Resource Software International (RSI)

SIP Print, and

snom

These partners were selected to address specific market needs that growing small and medium businesses are looking to deploy.

These markets include:

Desktop IP Phones (Polycom)

DECT Wireless Phones (snom)

SoftPhones (Counterpath)

Speech Recognition (Incendonet)

Call Accounting (RSI)

Call Recording (SIP Print)

Unified Messaging (MultiTech)

Telepresence/Video Conferencing (Lifesize)

SIP Trunking Service Providers who offer IP telephony services that are certified to be fully interoperable with the NetVanta 7000 include:

Bandwidth.com

BroadVox

Covad Communications

CommPartners Connect

Speakeasy

Voxitas

Motorola, Vocera Team for Healthcare Solution

March 31, 2009 10:59 AM

Motorola, Inc. and Vocera Inc., expanded their relationship with an agreement to jointly deliver solutions combining Vocera's experience in providing targeted communications solutions and Motorola's expertise in enterprise handheld devices. The joint solution addresses the healthcare market, and is designed to deliver improved healthcare at a patient's bedside.

Healthcare staff will be able to utilize the Vocera communications system on Motorola's Enterprise Digital Assistants (EDA) and voice-over-wireless LAN (VoWLAN) smartphones to improve collaboration, increase patient safety, and provide more attentive care.

The first Vocera-enabled solutions will be a range of Motorola EDAs, including the MC70, MC75, and MC55. Vocera has also developed a software client that will be sold as a software upgrade to run on the Windows Mobile handheld computers delivering instant VoWLAN communication capabilities.

Also announced was the Vocera smartphone, which in addition to traditional full phone functionality will offer Vocera's signature voice-enabled calling and messaging capabilities within the enterprise. The solution will be based on Motorola's TEAM VoWLAN solution, The new semi-rugged phone will run the Windows Mobile 6.1 operating system, giving users access to a wide variety of applications, such as electronic medical records.

8x8 Launches Enterprise Scale Virtual Office IP PBX Solution

March 30, 2009 11:03 PM

I recently had the opportunity to meet with 8x8's Huw Rees to discuss that company's steps to move their Virtual Office hosted IP PBX solution "upstream" to serve larger organizations in the small to medium sized business range.

Well, today the company officially announced the availability of an enterprise version of its hosted IP PBX phone service suited for deployment in larger organizations. This latest solution is designed to fit in a variety of environments, including a single building, a campus or distributed across multiple locations.

Positioned as the latest generation of 8x8's broadband agnostic hosted IP PBX business phone solutions, 8x8 Virtual Office Enterprise is now being positioned to offer a host of features, flexibility and the economics of hosted VoIP to enterprise environments.

In a briefing today, Rees explained the announcement. "It's not just the technology," he said, "we completely re-did the network architecture."

To meet the critical performance requirements of large corporations, the 8x8 Virtual Office Enterprise solution provides high availability, quality and redundancy. 8x8 recently upgraded its service infrastructure, which included deploying a new triple redundant architecture across three independent data centers with each center connected to redundant IP access providers.

As a result of this new architecture, companies that experience a failure of any software component, server, cluster or even a complete data center failure will not experience an impact on the service to the end customer.

Looking ahead, keep your eyes open for 8x8 to release some unified communications related news later this year. No details yet, but as the company repositions its solutions to an audience of larger businesses, it makes sense to offer this type of solution.

Mitel Meeting Notes

March 30, 2009 10:35 PM

I visited with Mitel today, and they showed me several solutions designed to drive productivity, enhance customer service, and simplify network management. Thanks go to Stephen Beamish, vice president of business development and strategic alliances and Danielle McNeil, public relations manager for spending the time with me to discuss the new solutions.

First we discussed the Mitel Business Dashboard, a management portal designed to allow enterprise and contact center management to monitor call activity and collect trend data on call volumes and times.

The intelligent call tracking solution is available on the Mitel 500 Communication Platform.

In addition to the Business Dashboard, I also received a firsthand look at Mitel's latest desktop IP Phone, the 5360.

The 5360 color phone with Web capabilities designed to deliver a whole series of HTML-based applications. The phone boasts a 7-inch touch-screen display, which grants access to the applications. The device also features wideband audio, embedded gigabit Ethernet, and a built-in HTML toolkit for application development.

And lastly, while not exactly telling me what the surprise would be, Beamish told me of an upcoming Mitel promotion scheduled for April 16^th. Under the banner "One Connection - No Limits: Where You Are Should Not Dictate Where You Work," Mitel has created a Web page which apparently has received over 1,500 signups in the short time it has been public. For more on this upcoming news, visit http://pages.mitel-news.com/april16

It's clearly a mobile solutions play, but I'm curious to hear more on this.

Charter Moves to Next Phase in Bankruptcy

March 27, 2009 1:29 PM

Charter Communications, Inc., one of the largest cable companies in the U.S. today commenced the next phase of its previously announced financial restructuring, which is expected to reduce the Company's debt by approximately $8 billion.

"The financial restructuring is good news for Charter and our customers and, if approved, will result in Charter being better positioned to deliver the products and services our customers demand now and in the future," said Neil Smit, President and Chief Executive Officer.

According to the NY Times, Charter reportedly had about $21.7 billion in debt at the end of 2008. After the bankruptcy, the company will have $13 billion mainly in bank debt, which expires from 2013 to 2016, the Times reported.

So here's a major company, a virtual monopoly in many of its markets I bet, going into a structured bankruptcy in order to emerge in a better financial position on the other side.

Students in today's current events/economics classes are probably left scratching their heads... "What? No Bailout?"

Students who will be in current events/economics classes 15-25 years from now will probably just say thanks.

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Recently in Business Category

Shoretel, Mitel, All's Well That Ends Well

The Web: The Best is Yet to Come

eBay Looks to Spin Off Skype

Nuance Mobile Care Enhances User Experience

IBM Unveils Solutions and Partners Around Sametime Unified Telephony

ADTRAN Launches Alliance Program; Targets SMB

Motorola, Vocera Team for Healthcare Solution

8x8 Launches Enterprise Scale Virtual Office IP PBX Solution

Mitel Meeting Notes

Charter Moves to Next Phase in Bankruptcy

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