Greg Galitzine's VoIP Authority Blog - VoIP Archives

Shoretel, Mitel, All's Well That Ends Well

2009-05-07T20:30:04Z

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.

eBay Looks to Spin Off Skype

2009-04-15T11:27:12Z

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.

Busy Week Inches to a Close

2009-04-03T03:56:56Z

It's been quite a good week. The Dow is steadily rising (let's see what Friday brings: profit taking or Dow 8,000) and in less than 10 hours, it's wheels up for this Galitzine, heading home after a jam-packed week of IP communications at a couple of trade shows in Orlando and Las Vegas.

I've posted a few items already, covering some of the companies I met with and I have a few write-ups to go, but the bulk of the content will be coming to you in the form of videos posted to our TMC Newsroom. I can't remember such a busy schedule. I would say I met with well over 80 people this week, each with an interesting story to tell.

Truth be told the general feeling I walk away with after all these meetings is that innovation continues unabated, the economic malaise has to some degree spared a telecom sector that may have been prepared courtesy of the previous financial meltdown, and end users (you and me both) are growing ever more hungry for new apps - check that - new bandwidth hungry apps.

I'll be mostly out of pocket tomorrow as I'm flying back East across 3 time zones, but I look forward to hitting the ground running in short order.

Skype Party - Rich's Photos

2009-04-02T15:21:58Z

Rich has some great photos from the Skype party we attended last night. Thanks to the Skype team and congrats on the new launch!

ShoreTel Upgrades Unified Communications Offer

2009-04-01T02:42:24Z

ShoreTel has released the latest version of its Unified Communications software, ShoreTel 9. Among the new features, ShoreTel 9 is targeting mobile and desktop users with enhancements designed to enable them to communicate more effectively-regardless of location-and increase individual productivity.

I had the good fortune to meet ShoreTel Vice President of Marketing, Kevin Gavin, who shared some insights regarding the latest offering from his firm as well as the market opportunity in front of ShoreTel.

According to Gavin, "CIOs are still buying but they are considering more vendors and have become more price sensitive."

"Communications is a fundamentally strategic purchasing decision, and increasingly, UC brings hard dollar savings and CIOs are willing to spend on technology that gives a good return," he added.

The latest version of ShoreTel's flagship solution, offers a series of personalization features, including location-based services and individualized call handling, and enables users create custom call-routing scenarios to ensure priority callers can always reach them.

The solution supports integration with Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007, and according to the company, when Microsoft OCS 2007 is integrated with ShoreTel 7.5 and higher, customers can use Office Communicator to manage their ShoreTel phone, view other parties' presence, and exchange instant messages with other Microsoft and ShoreTel users.

ShoreTel 9 scales up to support larger sized businesses, offer Active Directory integration, and takes the company's renowned distributed architecture to the next level offering N+1 reliability, however it extends N+1 across the entire system, allowing customers to save money while maintaining high levels of reliability.

The upgraded solution also offers security enhancements including SRTP/AES encryption, which is designed to help ensure call privacy, as well as display encrypted call status on ShorePhone IP phones and ShoreWare Call Manager displays, so users can see at a glance that the call is secure.

As far as mobility is concerned, ShoreTel 9 offers location-based services for GPS-enabled mobile devices, allowing users to automatically custom route calls based on the user's location, ensuring that their most important contacts can always reach them, without having to manually manage their call handling settings.

For a full list of enhancements and features view the press release.

ADTRAN Launches Alliance Program; Targets SMB

2009-03-31T15:17:21Z

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

2009-03-31T14:59:21Z

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

2009-03-31T03:03:43Z

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

2009-03-31T02:35:51Z

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.

Dimension Data Drives Productivity, Cost Savings

2009-03-31T02:10:33Z

Down at the VoiceCon show in Orlando today I had the opportunity to meet with Mark Zerbe of Dimension Data. Zerbe is vice president, Converged Communications at the IT services and solutions provider.

Our discussion ranged to include a series of topics, but the key message that Zerbe spoke to was the fact that clients today want to talk about solutions that drive productivity and cut costs.

Zerbe told me that he believes that integrated collaboration is the technology wave for clients to ride this economic transition, in fact, he said, "IC may turn out to be the wave that helps pull us out of this 'transition.'"

I asked him to explain why it seems that video collaboration solutions seem to have taken off recently, to which he responded:

"Cisco Telepresence + Microsoft OCS + slow economy are combining to drive the market to adopt integrated video solutions."

The proof of course is in what the customers think:

The confluence of these technologies is helping to transform organizations, and customers are saying that these solutions are driving productivity and saving them money.

XConnect Certifies Covergence Session Manager

2009-03-23T13:59:36Z

XConnect continues to certify products as XConnect-Ready.

The latest product to earn the distinction is Covergence's Session Manager. The Covergence Session Manager (CSM) is described by the company as "a comprehensive package of security, Web-enabling and session management solutions for SIP applications and services marketed to service providers and enterprises."

The formal release, which hits the wires tomorrow, states:

Certification through the XConnect Ready Partners Program establishes that service providers deploying CSM can query XConnect's ENUM registry for session-routing information. The designation also means the CSM's routing and peering functions work securely and seamlessly for members of XConnect federations. This ensures, in turn, that calls from a CSM-equipped service provider's network can be routed over IP through any XConnect federation member, reaching end points all over the world while bypassing the PSTN.

The CSM is the latest device to complete interoperability testing and earn the XConnect certification. It joins an ecosystem comprising other network elements, such as SIP proxies and session border controllers, as well as converged ENUM and SS7/C7 addressing and routing engines.

Skype for SIP: VoIP Provider Targets Corporate PBX Market

2009-03-23T11:58:24Z

It was only a matter of time.

Skype today announced the Skype For SIP beta program, which will enable businesses to receive and manage inbound calls from Skype users on SIP-enabled PBX systems, connecting a company's Web site to the PBX system via click-to-call. The beta is initially available to a limited number of participants.

The financial benefits are clear, allowing businesses to connect to over 400 million registered Skype users while offering the features and integration capabilities of traditional office PBX systems.

According to the official announcement:

The beta version of Skype For SIP will enable business users to:

· Place Skype calls to landlines and mobile phones worldwide from any connected SIP-enabled PBX; reducing costs with Skype's low-cost global rates

· Purchase Skype's online numbers, to receive calls to the corporate PBX from landlines or mobile phones

· Manage Skype calls using their existing hardware and system applications such as call routing, conferencing, phone menus and voicemail.

Beginning today, SIP users, phone system administrators, developers and service partners are invited to apply to the Skype For SIP beta program. Applicants will need to be businesses, have an installed SIP based IP-PBX system, as well as a level of technical competency to configure their own SIP-enabled PBX.

During the beta period all calls will be charged at standard Skype rates. Further pricing details will be announced when the product is fully launched later this year.

8x8 Visit With Huw Rees

2009-03-18T17:10:02Z

If it's Wednesday, it must be San Jose...

Or in this case, more specifically, Santa Clara.

My colleagues and I just stopped in to see our friends at 8x8, who were gracious enough to spend some time with us on this cloudy day.

Things are moving steadily forward at 8x8, and according to Huw Rees, Vice President of Business and Channel Development, the firm continues to execute on its strategy of selling their Virtual Office services into the small and medium sized business (SMB) market space. Rees told us that they are focused on ramping up sales of their virtual trunking products and Microsoft Response Point services, as well as expanding their channel strategy to build a larger channel to serve ever larger customers, working up to the "M" of the SMB.

8x8 serves customers from 5 employees to several hundred employees, but according to Rees, the average customer tends to the smaller end of that scale. The goal of the channel expansion is is to grow the number of larger customers.

Anecdotal evidence points to a trend where larger organizations are more comfortable with using hosted communications services, and 8x8 is certainly in a position to serve this market.

We also went on a tour of the 8x8 facility, and we saw the variety of elements that go into making a successful VoIP service provider, including the NOC or network operations center, the QA testing workspace, the higher-level support call center, and the shipping/receiving dock, which according to Rees sees such volume, that 8x8 is the largest FedEx customer in Santa Clara.

We also got a glimpse into some of the exciting things that will be coming down the pike from 8x8, and I look forward to sharing those with my readers as soon as I am able to.

Infonetics: Carrier VoIP Market Down

2009-03-03T22:29:25Z

Infonetics Research has released the Q4 2008 edition of its Service Provider VoIP Equipment and Subscribers report.

And the news is not good.

According to Infonetics' Diane Myers, Directing Analyst, Service Provider VoIP and IMS:

"The fourth quarter of 2008 confirmed what we started seeing in the previous two quarters in North America, with signs in Western Europe and some parts of Asia as well: the market for carrier VoIP equipment has stalled due to large deployments nearing completion and shifting strategic priorities. The global economic downturn will likely exacerbate the drop in VoIP equipment sales."

According to the report, the streak of double-digit annual revenue growth, which has characterized the worldwide carrier VoIP equipment market since 2002, has come to a close.

In fact, the market declined for the first time ever in 2008, dropping 6%.

According to Infonetics, large RBOCs and ILECs are putting the brakes on VoIP as major projects are (or have been) completed. Furthermore, the economic downturn is forcing operators to move their capital expenditures to other strategic priorities.

There were some bright spots in the report. On the plus side, the Infonetics research bears out the following:

· The number of residential and SOHO VoIP subscribers worldwide increased at a steady clip, topping 107 million in 2008, driven mostly by EMEA and Asia Pacific;

· Nortel increased softswitch and trunk media gateway revenue, gaining share in both categories;

· Sonus increased its trunk media gateway revenue 45% in 4Q08 from 3Q08.

Infonetics' Enterprise Telephony Report: Winners and Prognostications

2009-02-26T15:43:51Z

I was on the road yesterday, a quick jaunt to Chicago for an interview with Tellabs. Rich blogged about it and posted a bunch of images from the trip, including one picture that so eloquently captured my thoughts on how busy O'Hare was.

The Tellabs facility is a beautiful. Modern, spacious, everything a corporate headquarters should be.

Watch for the interview with president and CEO Robert Pullen to be published soon in NGN magazine.

While I was winging my way back home, Infonetics Research announced its Q4 (2008) Enterprise Telephony report.

The headline of the release suns it up quite nicely: "Cisco takes lead in 2008 enterprise telephony market; Alcatel-Lucent, ShoreTel sole 4Q08 winners"

So amid the gloom:

· The worldwide enterprise telephony market dropped 14% sequentially in 4Q08 to $2.3 billion, with vendor revenue down for all types of equipment including pure IP PBX, hybrid PBX, and TDM PBX

· The main cause of the decline is the lack of new business creation and business expansion due to the difficult economic climate worldwide

There were some bright spots as well:

· Year-over-year, the overall PBX market is up 1.1%, with the IP PBX segments up and the TDM segment down as the market continues switching over from TDM to IP equipment

· Pure IP PBX revenue grew 25% worldwide in 2008, sustained by new product introductions

On the vendor front, the Infonetics report found that Alcatel-Lucent and ShoreTel -- alone among their competitors -- realized PBX equipment revenue gains in Q4, with Alcatel-Lucent's revenue up 13% sequentially and ShoreTel's revenue up 1%.

And despite a quarterly revenue loss, Cisco maintained the first spot in overall PBX/KTS revenue market share in 4Q08. According to the report, 2008 saw Cisco "grab the lead" for the entire year for the first time as well.

Matthias Machowinski, Directing Analyst, Enterprise Voice and Data, Infonetics Research had this to say:

Because of the significantly deteriorating worldwide economic conditions, we expect the overall enterprise telephony market to contract fairly significantly in 2009. Once the world's major economies start growing again, however, a recovery in the PBX market will follow. We expect the market to stabilize in 2010, resume growth in 2011, and hit double-digit annual growth by 2012.