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Ifbyphone Offers Service Guarantee

January 21, 2009 9:18 AM
Ifbyphone announced a new service guarantee today, saying that they will deliver their customers' voice broadcast calls on time otherwise those calls will be free.
 
According to CEO Irv Shapiro:
 
Our guarantee helps our business customers understand how important the delivery of their voice broadcast calls is to us. Moreover, our guarantee helps differentiate Ifbyphone's services because we are the first and only provider that stands 100 percent behind the delivery of voice broadcast calls.
 
The guarantee is simple: if any scheduled broadcast call to a U.S. or Canadian phone number is delayed by more than five minutes, Ifbyphone will reimburse customers for the call.
 
Shapiro is also on the schedule at the upcoming ITEXPO, which will take place in Miami Beach, FL, February 2-4, 2009.
 
On Wednesday February 4th, from 1:30-2:15pm Shapiro will be part of a panel discussion entitled: Contact Centers in a Web 2.0 World.
 
For more information on the show, or to register, visit www.itexpo.com
 
Just for the record, as I write this, it's 16 degrees in Connecticut where my office is located.
 
Florida sounds like a good idea.

TMCnet Blogs Week in Review

January 16, 2009 9:02 AM
It's been quite a week for news this week, and not just the run of the mill product announcements, customer wins and such. Some rather big things went down this week, and the TMCnet family of bloggers was all over the important developments.
 
It seems like a month has gone by, but in fact it was just this week that Obama officially tapped his former Harvard law classmate Julius Genachowski to head up the Federal Communications Commission or FCC. According to his bio, he was chief counsel to former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt, a VC and led the development of the president-elect's technology and innovation agenda.
 
Rich also covered the ascension of Carol Bartz to the position of CEO at Yahoo!
 
I am impressed and concerned. Bartz has an excellent resume with honors and awards as long as anyone...
 
What the company really needs is someone who has effectively led a small to medium media company in the last 18 months and understands the needs of advertisers and more importantly how to get them to spend more money with Yahoo. Her resume, while impressive includes Sun and 3M.
 
Basically zero media experience.
 
Is this bad? I am not sure. You don't know how someone meshes into an organization until they take the job.
 
It is worth mentioning Bartz should be effective at negotiating with other companies and could strike big deals which bring in revenue. From this perspective she has the appropriate resume.
 
 
The news spread like wildfire that a Verizon executive spoke to a Bloomberg reporter about a world, just seven years hence, when the carrier would no longer be offering voice over copper lines. So I thought, ok, yeah, that's worthy of inclusion on my blog. The next day, Verizon's senior VP of media relations Eric Rabe said, effectively: Not True! Which, I thought was, you know... worthy of inclusion in my blog too. The upshot? As Rabe wrote in the company's Verizon Policy blog:
 
 
The Verizon traditional phone system will serve customers for a long time to come.
 
 
Perhaps the biggest story in telecom this week was Nortel filing for bankruptcy. Rich was ahead of the curve with his initial post, and then several of us followed, weighing in from various angles. I addressed the issue here and here, Tom Keating wrote about the Nortel situation on his VoIP and Gadgets Blog that
 
 
...perhaps we in the media should carefully consider what we say ... Sometimes the media and bloggers are way too gleeful when a company 'titan' takes a fall.
 
 
Rich followed up his original post with an interview he did with Nortel Enterprise President Joel Hackney, where Hackney played down the bankruptcy element of the week's events and focused on the restructuring.
 
Peter Radizeski gives his insights here.
 
David Byrd added his thoughts on his SIP and Serve blog, noting that as Nortel falls, another company in this space, AudioCodes, is rising.
 
And Brendan Read wrote a great piece about Nortel from the Canadian political perspective, and that any potential dismantling of Nortel to US firms would likely be a tough sell. Brendan, a Canadian with a political science background, writes that such a purchase in whole is not likely to happen:
 
...because Canada's Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, cannot afford to let his minority Conservative government be ousted from power by the Opposition Liberals who now have a new, smart (and U.S.-educated) leader, Michael Ignatieff, on the albeit simplistic flag-waving nationalistic issue of keeping Nortel Canadian.
 
 
HD Voice, or high-definition voice, based on wideband audio codecs was in the TMC blog buzz this week as we announced plans to host a panel exploring the benefits of this emerging technology at the upcoming ITEXPO.
 
Rich, who will serve as the moderator of the panel, which features speakers from Polycom, AudioCodes, Texas Instruments, Octasic, and Alteva offered up some excellent analysis of the technology in his post, Communications Must Go HD.
 
Writing on TMCnet's VoIP and Video over IP blog, GIPS VP of engineering Jan Linden continues the discussion of HD Conferencing as he describes a way to approximate a telepresence experience at a much lower cost.
 
 
Kim Devlin-Allen, writing in her IP Communications Design blog, revisits the issue of the health and vitality of VoIP and comes away with a positive feeling.
 
I had the opportunity to brainstorm on the future of VoIP with some of the leading IT managers on the west coast, and they overwhelmingly agreed that for their enterprises, it is no longer a question of if they will deploy VoIP, but rather when those deployments occur. Although the current state of the economy may affect the pace of deployments, I think it's fair to say that the enterprise market is committed to merging their voice and data networks and is moving in the direction of full IP.
 
I wonder what Hunter Newby would say? For one thing we can expect he would make his case for proper naming conventions, as he takes the position in his VoIPeering blog that VoIP is NOT Internet Telephony.
 
Make sure you stay up to speed with the latest from all the TMCnet bloggers.

Expert Panel to Explore HD Voice at ITEXPO

January 12, 2009 11:49 AM
On the events side at TMC, we're always looking to deliver compelling content to the attendees at our shows. As many of you are no doubt aware, ITEXPO is just around the corner. The show will be taking place this February 2-4 in Miami Beach. For more information, or to register, please visit the ITEXPO event Web site.
 
The purpose of this post is to draw your attention to a very special session that we are offering to ITEXPO conference attendees.
 
On Tuesday, February 3rd, from Noon to 1:00 P.M. Conference Luncheon attendees will be treated to a panel discussion entitled: "HD -- What's the noise and are we ready?"
 
We've heard a lot over the last six months about high-definition voice solutions and about the possibility for IP Communications solutions that leverage wideband codecs to exceed the fidelity and clarity of the PSTN. Microsoft Office Communicator and Skype have seeded the market with examples of applications that allow users to experience this new fidelity.
 
We've invited a cross section of industry leaders to a special panel discussion to discuss this topic and find out if we indeed are ready for HD.
 
The session moderator is Rich Tehrani - President and Group Editor-in-Chief of TMC, and panelists include:
 
·         Alan Percy, Director of Market Development, AudioCodes
·         Tim Yankey, Director of Product, Marketing, Voice Communications Solutions, Polycom
·         Debbie Greenstreet, Director of Service Provider Marketing, Texas Instruments
 
This promises to be a very interesting session, so make plans now to attend.
 
Click on the following link for more information on the show or to register to attend the sessions.

It's That Time of Year...

December 8, 2008 5:11 PM
As the year comes to a close, it's time again to feature that publishing staple -- the year end interview.

end of year.jpg
 
I'm fortunate enough to work in an industry where people not only have a lot of interesting things to say, they're not shy about sharing their thoughts and insights with our audience.
               
Below you'll find links to several interviews I've posted with some of the companies that operate in our space.
 
Among the threads that are tying these together (so far) is the belief that mobility holds the key to our industry's future. Mobile VoIP, mobile video, mobile UC... you get the picture.
 
I invite you to take a look at this first batch of interviews. There's more on tap, so check back often.
 
 
Jon R. Doyle, CommuniGate's vice president of business development talks about mobility...
 
Xorcom CEO Eran Gal discusses open source and the opportunity ahead...
 
Vivek Khuller, President and CEO of DiVitas Networks remains cautiously optimistic for 2009...
 
Mike Goodman, Product Marketing Manager of PROGNOSIS gives an Australian perspective...
 
 
GIPS vice president of engineering, Jan Linden previews his sessions at ITEXPO and touts mobility...

Quintum/NET and Microsoft Connect at ITEXPO

September 17, 2008 1:32 PM
I just left Microsoft's meeting room at ITEXPO, where executives from Quintum/NET and Microsoft's Response Point team shared the news (and showed off the hardware) that Quintum/NET has developed two new gateways designed specifically for Microsoft Response Point systems: a VoIP T1/E1/PRI version and a four-port FXS.
 
The gateways are designed to work with Response Point systems from all of the solution OEMs (Aastra, Syspine, and D-Link)
 
The gateways have been designed and are currently undergoing beta testing. General availability is expected in mid-October.
 
The pricing is as such: the four-port is listed at $330; the T1/E1/PRI is $1,800.
For more details, check out Michael Dinan's full coverage.

Open Source News at ITEXPO

September 17, 2008 12:21 PM
If you follow open source telephony, today is a good day for news from the major players in the market.
 
Digium
Digium kicks off the ITEXPO open source news review today. The Huntsville-based creators of Asterisk announced that Camrivox Limited, a unified communications technology vendor that designs solutions that unify telephony with on-demand CRM applications has joined their technology partnership program.
 
The Camrivox Flexor CTI Software family of products offers SMBs a simple way to marry on-demand CRM (Customer Relationship Management) applications with IP PBX telephony and VoIP handsets. The company's upcoming release of Flexor Connect for Asterisk brings an extra dimension to the Asterisk community and follows through with tangible benefits to businesses focused on maximizing their customer interaction.
 
The partnership will allow Asterisk users to benefit from other Flexor CTI Software products, including CTI for Outlook, Salesforce, NetSuite, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
 
Sangoma
Sangoma Technologies today announced its newest product line, dubbed NetBorder Express VoIP Gateway Cards. Sangoma's cards, in concert with this new set of software building blocks combine to deliver a SIP to TDM VoIP Gateway solution. Integrators and developers can also use the new solution to develop SIP-based applications such as iPBX, IVRs, and Conferencing Servers.
 
The cards include Telco-grade, hardware echo cancellation, and customers can purchase up to eight spans on a single board and can deploy multiple boards in a server.
 
Current owners of Sangoma's T1/E1 card with hardware echo cancellation can download a trial version of the software at: www.sangoma.com/nbe_trial/.
 
Fonality
Fonality used ITEXPO as a venue to announce a major upgrade to their unified communications platform, HUD and released HUD 3.0. The solution ties presence management and detection into a single interface to be used by employees for all types of office communications, including SMS, instant message, landline calling, mobile calling, chat, voicemail, email, conferencing, recording and barging.
 
Other features include Photo caller ID, Google Talk integration, Mobile presence, Busy-Ring Back, Visual conferencing, Visual voice mail and more.
 
PIKA
PIKA Technologies also made headlines today when they announced that they were receiving rave reviews from customer deploying their WARP appliance since launching the product in June.
 
PIKA WARP the Appliance was created expressly for companies that build Linux-based custom IP-PBXs as well as other telecommunications solutions such as IVRs, dialers and logging systems, using both proprietary and open source software. Because of its compact size and cost effective pricing, the WARP appliance is ideal for small and medium enterprises.
 
OrecX
Last, but certainly not least, OrecX -- the primary developer and sponsor of the open source call recording initiative managed by Oreka -- announced that OPTSP CO.LTD, a Tokyo, Japan-based distributor has secured an exclusive contract to support and distribute their Oreka TR call recording solution in the Japanese market.
 
All of the above companies are exhibiting at ITEXPO this week.
 
·         Digium will be in the Open Source pavilion.
·         Sangoma will be in booth 519.
·         Fonality is in the Open Source pavilion and booth 402.
·         PIKA will be in the Communications Developer section of the show floor at ComDev 102.
·         OrecX will be in the Open Source pavilion.
 
If you're interested in open source telephony come on down to the LA Convention Center and meet these companies for yourself.
 
The Exhibit Hall is open today (Wednesday September 17) from 4:00 pm - 8:00 pm, and tomorrow (Thursday September 18) from 11:00 am - 5:00pm.
 
If you register online, you can save the $50 onsite registration fee.
 
 
 
 
 

Communications Developer Keynote: Avaya's Lawrence Byrd

September 16, 2008 7:55 PM
Lawrence Byrd, Director of Unified Communications Architecture at Avaya kicked off the keynote schedule of the Communications Developer conference on Tuesday with a presentation entitled Unified Communications in a Web 2.0 World.
 
The gist of the speech was that developers will play a critical role in the future of communications, and in fact the developer community is the engine that runs the IP communications world.
 
Byrd threw about several definitions of "2.0," including one from Tim O'Reilly that defines the Web 2.0 phenomenon as "...networked apps that explicitly leverage network effects."
 
Byrd also used this definition from Harvard Business School's Andrew McAfee, "Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies and between companies and their partners and customers."
 
In any event the developer community should recognize this as an opportunity; an expanded playground to create ways of connecting these elements to deliver added value for their end customers.
 
"We've spent the last 20 years trying to connect the phone to the Web," said Byrd. "Connect the Web to the store. That is the definition of unified communications, connecting both the old and the new."
 
And as we move ahead we need to be sure that legacy applications and modern cutting edge applications work well together. That is how we add value. It has to work together. It has to be an integrated space, Byrd said.
 
In the 2.0 Life, we need to connect people and processes. These days, people are scattered about in their daily business lives. We connect virtually, we share info among branch offices, we're increasingly working from home or while we're mobile.
 
The communications functionality we seek needs to be similar across all these disparate environments.
 
Byrd told the audience, "...developers need to create solutions that have an impact on people and how they work in business."
 
"In this environment UC is creating a seamless way to get things done, giving users the tools they need to do their job," he added. "It all has to be integrated."
 
And one size will not fit all in the 2.0 world. People's roles are different and unified communications is about the right tools for the right job for the right people at the right time.
 
Developers need to create a set of tools that optimize a particular way of working for a particular group of employees.
 
Byrd suggested that there are three tools at the disposal of developers and that these three technologies make up the fabric of what developers need to leverage to create the next generation of communications applications.
 
These three tools are SIP, presence and SOA (service oriented architecture).
 
SIP needs to be seen as an application- and distance-connecting protocol, making applications work together in a more loosely coupled way.
 
Evolution is driving new kinds of communications. Video is everywhere driving new ways for people to communicate together. SIP is helping drive this transition.
 
SIP is the fundamental way how the enterprise gets connected, Byrd said. Applications in one place, people in another place...
 
All of this means that the SIP foundation in an enterprise needs to be solid, standard and secure.
 
We need to embed presence inside our applications to make them presence aware.
 
Knowing the presence of people and applications will help bring the right resources together tied together with business process, in order to solve the business challenge at hand.
 
One key takeaway from Byrd's speech is that developers need to use a software abstraction layer to be able to bring together existing presence engines to enable users to take advantage of it in a single way. Byrd called this intelligent presence aggregation.
 
"It's beyond sharing," he said. "It's combining and producing a single identity.
 
In software development key is to have a lower level abstraction layer that enables acceleration of business process by streamlining human interactions.
 
Developers need to bridge the gap between business process level and raw communications by leveraging such elements as SOA and Web services.
 
We need to have our communications development environment more horizontal, more shared, Byrd stressed. The concepts of IMS can be brought to bear in enterprise application development and developer methodology.
 
Thus SOA becomes the third layer of the developer fabric.
 
SOA, presence and SIP must work together in an integrated combined way that will allow developers to build a business application with the goal of delivering value internally to employees but more importantly impacting the customer experience.
 
Byrd gave the developer crowd the following advice:
·         Innovate around the customer and user experiences;
·         Apply your own industry expertise to address challenges; and
·         Reuse as much as possible: Mashups are a great way of realizing this.
 
"The three fabric technologies are SIP, SOA and presence working together. Use platforms that bring these together to create applications that will solve the challenges you face," said Byrd in conclusion.
 
 

Live Video Streaming; Skype: VoIP Is Dead Keynote at ITEXPO

September 16, 2008 6:53 PM
Skype's Jonathan Christensen is speaking right now about how VoIP is dead.
 
Of course he's just generating some controversy, but it's an attention grabbing headline nonetheless.
 
Meanwhile check out Tom's blog.
 
I'm sitting next to him and he's holding up his smart phone and I'm thinking... "What the #$%^& is he doing?"
 
Well he's shooting video of the keynoter and he's streaming video via his blog.
 
It's pretty cool to tell the truth.
 
Next best thing to being there and all that...
 
Check out his blog and see the playback later on, or if you're lucky enough to catch my blog within a few minutes of posting, click here to see Tom's ITEXPO live video streaming of the keynotes.
 

Aastra Makes Headlines at ITEXPO

September 16, 2008 5:18 PM
Aastra Telecom made several announcements this morning in conjunction with their participation at Internet Telephony Conference and EXPO in Los Angeles. Aastra will be exhibiting in the open source pavilion at ITEXPO on Wednesday and Thursday.
 
First up, Aastra introduced the Aastra MBU 400 DECT Mobility solution, which is designed to slot in between the company's personal mobility solution and their enterprise class SIP DECT solution, which were previously announced.
 
Aastra also announced a Web portal called myAastra.com.
 
Lastly Aastra announced that they will be releasing a software upgrade to their Asterisk-based solution (AastraLink Pro) in the November time frame.

For more details, please check out this article.

VoIP Logic at ITEXPO

September 16, 2008 2:07 PM
VoIP Logic, has announced a new solution -- CDR Manager -- a Call Detail Record Management module for its Cortex OSS middleware. CDR Manager is designed to serve as an easy-to-use, hosted tool for real-time reporting and access to call records and other raw user data.
This latest module is geared towards providing integration between systems and the monitoring and management tools carriers and services providers require to run them.
 
Cortex is the central component that drives VoIP Logic's VoIP managed services and solutions portfolio. The company enables telecommunications service providers worldwide to build and manage customized, flexible and scalable IP telephony rollouts. By deploying the Cortex OSS middleware system, VoIP Logic is able to provide their service customers with a comprehensive, fully neutral, set of on-demand solutions for service providers looking to use VoIP technology.
 
According to CEO Micah Singer, "What we're trying to do is to make something complex more simple. We want to provide the compelling applications that will help providers achieve this."
 
In addition to the company's wholesale billing app and the just released CDR Manager, a third announcement is set for the coming weeks. Singer hinted at a peering/recording solution that will feature advanced monitoring, and advanced configurability.
 
Singer believes that for his customers, effective support is a key driver for growth. Larger carriers want customization, and as VoIP Logic moves upstream, they will gain access to a larger piece of the pie with professional services.
 
In other news, VoIP Logic also announced this morning that Inc. magazine ranked the company at number 2,369 on its annual ranking of the 5,000 fastest-growing private companies in the country.
 
Singer commented, "We are honored to be recognized as a success story, and as one of 100 fastest growing telecom companies. This recognition speaks not only to the expertise and know-how of our team, but also to the global adoption of VoIP and the significant growth taking place in our market."
 
VoIP Logic is exhibiting at ITEXPO this week in booth 435.
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