April 2005 Archives

Last year we were invited at the last moment to host a party at Supercomm with the IPCC. We sponsored a cruise for over 100 people and it was one of the best events I was ever part of. I even bought a tux for the occasion (you know you can rent them now?

After the cruise was over, someone at he IPCC suggested we have the party again the next year in the Hancock Building. Not being from Chicago I somehow decided he meant Sears Tower.

Long story short, I reserved the most amazing room in the Sears Tower and we are hosting a party this year on Tuesday, June 7^th 5:30-8:00 PM (right after the show ends)

The party is for SuperComm Exhibitors and service providers as well as friends and associates of TMC (you know who you are :-) and of course that stray relative or two of mine that happens to be in the area.

There will be music, food, amazing views, a photographer and some of the Chicago Luvabulls in attendance.

Here are the details. Please RSVP in order to get on the list.

Hope to see you there.

June seems like it is so far away but it really isn't. I can't believe it it's so close. I am really happy that Supercomm invited me back to speak at their event. I had great fun speaking last year and am sure the audience participation will be just as good this year as last. We have some great speakers on this panel and Mike Khalilian is a first rate moderator and knows more about VoIP than just about anyone else around.

I am speaking on a panel titled:

VoIP Services & Networks

Monday, June 6, 10.00 am - 11:30 am in Room S105 of McCormick Place in downtown Chicago.

Here are some details direct from Supercomm. Note that I have been graciously promoted by Supercomm to CEO. No complaints about the promotion (do I get a raise?) but really I am happy with the current responsibility level.

Chairperson: Michael Khalilian, Chairman and President, IPCC

Speakers:

Hugh Kelly, President and Chief Executive Officer, West Ridge Networks
Vish Raju, Vice President-Product Management, SIPQuest
Rich Tehrani, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Technology Marketing Corporation
Earl Turner, Senior Director-VoIP Technology, Time Warner Telecom

You want to know how popular VoIP is? Just ask Skype, a company whose website just blew past the 500 mark on the list of most popular sites in the world! The numbers come courtesy of Alexa.com, an Amazon company. They currently rank at 462 out of sites worldwide. This rank as of today puts them five spots ahead of the Wall Street Journal! Six spots ahead of Circuit City and ten ahead of PayPal! For those of you that care – (I don’t of course -- the wife is always reading;-), they beat Victoria Secret by 22.

Netcordia just announced an addition to its product line, the Enterprise 2000, which provides network diagnostic support for large networks up to 2,000 routers and switches. It also has configuration policy analysis, which, as you know, is an emerging market in the network management space.

As the name implies, the product supports up to 2,000 routers and switches or up to 60,000 interfaces. With the addition of configuration policy analysis in this model, NetMRI users can easily check every configuration file for accurate policies. The analysis can be automatically performed on a daily basis, or on an ad hoc basis, making this a readily adaptable management tool for busy network managers.  he auto-generated reports highlight the exceptions in a glance, providing correctional guidance as well as a compliance proof source.

The NetMRI line has three other models that have been shipping since 2003, the Campus 200, the Enterprise 500 and the Enterprise 1000.  The models all provide the same interface, reports, root cause analysis, and functional support of VoIP, Wireless, VLANs and IP as the other models; they differ in the size of the network supported. The NetMRI product line starts at $24,900, and ranges up to $149,900 for the Enterprise 2000 Model.

As I have said all along the network testing market is red hot due in large part to the success of the VoIP market which is driving sales of network monitoring and diagnostic products.

According to the AP, Up to 10 times as many people as originally thought may have had their profiles stolen from a LexisNexis database in the United States, publisher and data broker Reed Elsevier Group PLC said Tuesday.

The company reported last month that criminals may have accessed personal details of 32,000 people via a breach of LexisNexis' recently acquired Seisint unit. It now says that figure is closer to 310,000 people.

Reed said it identified 59 incidents since January 2003 in which unauthorized persons, predominantly using IDs and passwords of legitimate Seisint customers, may have fraudulently acquired personal identifying information on thousands of people

Information accessed included names, addresses, Social Security and driver license numbers, but not credit history, medical records or financial information, the company said.

The company said the 59 identified incidents of fraudulently obtained information - 57 at Seisint and two in other LexisNexis units - are largely related to the misappropriation by third parties of IDs and passwords belonging to legitimate customers. It stressed that neither LexisNexis nor the Seisint technology infrastructure was breached by hackers.

I ordered a $15 Firewire cable for a new video recorder. I ordered the wrong cable as it turns out. Interestingly this order was placed by an affiliate of Amazon and when I tried to ask if I could exchange it a few e-mails went unanswered.

A few weeks later Amazon sent me a survey asking me if I was satisfied with my order. My response was that the vendor didn’t respond to my two e-mails. I didn’t realize my response was now posted online, permanently.

Guess who called me a few days later. The vendor. They credited my card for the cable purchase and told me not so ship it back (for some reason they couldn’t exchange it) and asked nicely if I would have any issues removing my post now.

I tried to remove the post but couldn’t figure out how to do it. The vendor scrambled and it seemed like the whole company was researching how to do this. After a while they sent me detailed instructions on how to remove feedback (at my request).

This is amazing to me as I saw in action that a company not providing customer service to a $15 customer (granted I spent a thousand plus dollars on the video camera the same day I ordered the cable – just not from them) can break a company if you don’t provide good service.

I feel terrible that I cost this company business but at the same I marvel at how powerful the Internet can be. I wonder if there is a “pen is mightier than the sword” analogy for the Internet. Is it “The Internet is more powerful than the lawsuit?”

The whole incident amazes me and should teach us all that selling products in a world where there is an Internet – whether you sell online or not is very dangerous. You can’t take even your smallest customer for granted as sometimes these are the customers who can break your reputation.

Check Point Software announced two new products - VPN-1 Edge W and Check Point Express CI (Content Inspection). The first is a wireless security appliance targeted at enterprise customers and the second is an integrated content security software solution targeted at mid-sized companies.

Dictaphone Corporation announced today that it has signed a definitive agreement with NICE Systems under which NICE will acquire the assets of Dictaphone’s Communication Recording Systems (CRS) business for $38.5 million. The CRS unit is a leading provider of recording systems for 9-1-1 centers and other mission-critical operations in the public safety, financial, and call center markets. The boards of both companies have unanimously approved the transaction, which is expected to close by the end of the second quarter of 2005, subject to certain closing conditions.

Dictaphone’s sale of the CRS unit is part of its strategy to create a company focused principally on the healthcare information technology market. Dictaphone’s Healthcare Solutions Group deploys dictation, transcription and speech recognition software systems in over half of the hospitals in the U.S. Its solutions automate critical elements in the creation and management of health information, helping healthcare organizations improve productivity and the quality of patient care.

“For several years, we have experienced strong growth and developed an industry leading product portfolio based on speech recognition and natural language processing technologies in our healthcare business,” said Rob Schwager, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Dictaphone Corporation. “Seeing the tremendous opportunity in the healthcare IT market along with Dictaphone’s excellent position within it, we determined that this was an appropriate time to focus our personnel, investment and other resources mainly on our healthcare business. I am pleased that the CRS business has found a good home with an industry leader such as NICE Systems.”

Dictaphone will retain its Integrated Voice Systems and other business units. The Company intends to use the proceeds of the CRS sale to continue the pursuit of its healthcare information technology growth.

My take: Healthcare is growing quickly and this is a logical move to focus on a fast-growing and less competitive market.

Seems like the states are going crazy, focusing on why VoIP providers aren’t providing 911 support. According to this VoIP e911 article, Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich is proposing legislation to get Internet-based phone providers to give customers the same kind of access to 911 operators as those who use regular telephone lines. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the FCC is working with RBOCs who SURPIRISE, aren’t allowing unfettered access to 911 infrastructure. What the mainstream press isn’t picking up on is that many VoIP providers, especially Vonage are trying to provide 911 service that is on par or better than the PSTN. When you don’t have the keys to the house, it is tough to get in and the RBOCS aren’t the industry’s best friend at the moment. The feds need to make sure VoIP providers have unfettered access to PSAPS and they also need to require that all VoIP providers have e911 service equal the PSTN.

Ah, the Boston Tea Party, a watershed event in the history of the United States and the independence of this great country. Just uttering the two words tea party together will make anyone aware of US history think back to ships over two hundred years ago in the Boston harbor with crates of tea leaves floating in harbor.

So it is logical that MIT, a Massachusetts based university would use TParty as the name of its new initiative in cooperation with laptop maker Quanta. What is this initiative you ask? To develop the next-generation of computing.

According to this TechWeb article, TParty's goal is "to create new systems for the development and seamless delivery of information services in a world of smart devices and sensors. This will require reengineering and an extension of the underlying technical infrastructure, the creation of new interfaces, and exploring new ways of managing and accessing information."

OK, I have to admit, this is a generic announcement. Not much meat to sink your teeth int. But with backers such as MIT and Quanta – the company that manufacturers OEM laptops for the likes of Apple, Dell, IBM and HP – you have to wonder if these companies aren’t capable of contributing something revolutionary to computing.

AOL and XM have agreed to jointly create a radio service according to the WSJ who says the new cobranded service, which hasn't been named yet, will replace the current paid service on XM's Web site and will replace AOL's current radio services -- AOL Radio and Netscape Radio.

XM receives a powerful incentive in this deal as it will be able to market to over 20 million AOL users while AOL will be able to add 70 commercial free XM channels to its 130 other channels. AOL will package these stations for their subscribers and will also have a package for non-subscribers.

My take on this is that this is a win-win strategy and we will see Sirius coming back with an announcement with probably Yahoo! Or MSN. Google will also be heavily considering whether such a launch makes sense for them. In my opinion newspaper companies will get into the act soon as well. We talk about the triple play being part voice, video and data. Radio too can be part of the mix. It is all about increasing average revenue per user or ARPU and the more services you have to offer the more revenue you make.

A friend of mine is an excellent PR/marketing freelancer in the Maryland/DC area. He is great at building relationships with the press and has no equal at trade shows where he can lure large crowds. He is also great at strategizing and can manage a team. He has experience in contact centers and technology in general. If you are interested in seeing his resume, please drop me a line at rtehrani@tmcnet.com.

I recently came across the Radicati Market Stats & Industry Commentary and thought it worth sharing.

E-mail

• In 2005, each email user will have an average of 1.75 mailboxes. This figure will grow to 2.0 mailboxes per user by 2008.
• MS Exchange revenue is approximately $1.6 billion in 2005. Over the next four years, MS Exchange revenue will increase at an average rate of about 10% totaling $2.4 billion in 2008.

SECURITY

Worldwide email traffic will increase at an average annual rate of 21% over the next four years, totaling about 195 billion messages per day in 2009.

• Commercial advertising, the most common form of spam, accounts for 58% of worldwide spam traffic.
• We anticipate the market for Full Suite products to be one of the fastest growing segments in the security industry-in fact, revenue is expected to grow from $185 million in 2004 to $492 million in 2008.
• If nothing is done to stop the increasing growth in phishing attacks, we anticipate the number of unique phishing attacks will grow from 51 unique attacks in 2004 to 404 in 2008.

DIRECTORY

• In general, we estimate that in the directory space for every $1 spent on products, an additional $3 is spent on professional services.
• We estimate the installed base for NOS (Network Operating System) directory services will increase from 279 million entries in 2004, to over 518 million entries in 2008.

WIRELESS

• We project that by year-end 2008, there will be 873,600 WLAN hotspots worldwide, an increase from 70,000 in 2004.

IDENTITY MANAGEMENT

• The full suite segment of the Identity Management market is still in its infancy – it is expected to grow substantially from $170 million in 2004 to over $5.9 billion by 2008.

OK so let’s sum this up. Spam and phishing will become more and more of a menace, Microsoft will rake in more and more money and hotspot growth will increase nicely. Oh, one last thought -- we will all have more mailboxes to check. Will this trend ever slow I wonder?

This is the draft schedule of events for the ATA (American Teleservices Association) Regulatory event I am speaking at soon. As you can see, I will be speaking with Chris Hodges from Noble Systems, Larry Mark from SER, Jason Pace from Stratasoft, and Paul Stockford of Saddletree Research) on Monday, April 18^th, 2005.

I will be addressing the future of the contact center with my esteemed panelists. I have lost of creative ideas on this subject and have promised to get my presentation to the ATA by tomorrow. Trouble is, it is an incredibly beautiful day and I am debating playing hooky today. I mean this is the first weekend we have seen sun in the northeast and it may even hit 70 degrees today. I am sure my readers in California cant relate but this is like a present from Mother Nature you just shouldn't waste.

Draft (v.7)
2005 Washington Summit
April 17-20, 2005
Hyatt Regency on Capitol Hill

Sunday, April 17
12:00 – 6:00pm Registration
12:00 - 5:00 pm Board of Directors Meeting (Lunch: 12:00 – 12:30)
12:00 – 5:00 pm Selected Committee Meetings
5:00 – 6:00 pm VIP Reception (Chapter Pres, BOD, and sponsors)
6:00 – 7:00 pm Welcome Reception (Hyatt Regency)
7:00 pm Board of Directors Dinner (Capital Grille)

Monday, April 18 (Current Industry Situational Perspective)
7:30 – 9:00 am Registration
8:00 – 9:00 am Continental Breakfast
9:00 – 9:15 am Opening Remarks (Stuart Discount)
9:15 – 10:15 am Regulations and Federal & State Legislation (Joe Sanscrainte & Bill Brierly, and Rich Rosenblatt, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius)
10:15 -10:30 am Break
10:30 –11:30 am Business/Financial Outlook & Climate (Brandon Dobell of Credit Suisse First Boston)
11:30 – 12:30 Lunch (separate room)
12:30 – 1:30 pm Tucker Carlson (Keynote)
1:30 – 2:30 pm ATA Positions (ATA/DMA)/ Regulatory: What's Next? (Jim Conway of DMA, Mitch Roth of ATA)
2:30 – 3:00 pm Break
3:00 – 4:00 pm Consumer Affairs Perspective on Teleservices (Dr. Dale Lewison, University of Ohio, Deborah Berlyn, AARP and one other)
4:00 – 5:00 pm Technology Perspective (Changes we can expect) (Rich Tehrani with a panel including Chris Hodges from Noble Systems, Larry Mark from SER, Jason Pace from Stratasoft, and Paul Stockford of Saddletree Research)
6:00 – 7:00 pm Reception at the Hyatt

Tuesday, April 19 (Self-Determination Perspective)

8:00 – 9:00 am Continental Breakfast w/ Congressional Speaker (TBD)
9:00 – 11:30 am Table Discussion – Working Session on Standards for Inbound
11:30 – 1:00 pm Lunch /Keynotes (Sen. Max Baucus, D-MT and Rep. Lee Terry R-NE) (Sen. Baucus 1200-1230; Rep Terry 1230-1:00)
1:00 – 2:00 pm Leadership Collaboration
2:00 – 2:30 pm Break
2:30 – 4:00 pm Leadership Presentations
4:00 – 5:00 pm SRO Presentation (Lisa DeFalco or Phil Grudzinski)
6:00 – 7:30 pm Awards Gala on the Hill (SD-G50, Dirksen Bldg) – Sen. Hagel
(Honoree)

Wednesday, April 20 (On the Hill)
8:00 – 9:00 am Continental Breakfast for NFP Committee
9:00 – 9:30 am ATA Lobbying Priorities
9:30 – 10:30 am Congressional Visit Role Play
10:30 – 1:00 pm Congressional Appointments

Compliance Seminar starts at noon

More VoIP URLS. Some interesting ones are www.aol-voip.com and www.at-t-voip.com, both of which have their contact details hidden. I suspect they are registered by the same person or corporation and I assume they aren't an agent of AT&T or AOL. Peter Nguyen from Houston, Texas registered www.earnmillionswithvoip.com. This one scares me as I can imagine getting a daily spam message with such a headline. Rommer Consulting picked up www.thevoipresource.com which is a good get in my opinion. The pace of VoIP URLs is accelerating with a total of 90 new and 17 on hold domain names yesterday.

1. 11voip.com

2. 32connectvoip.com

3. 32connectvoip.net

4. 800voip.net

5. allovoip.com

6. annuaire-voip.com

7. annuairevoip.com

8. aol-voip.com

9. at-t-voip.com

10. boldvoip.com

11. boldvoip.net

12. broadband-phone-service-voip.com

13. campusvoip.net

14. comcast-voip.com

15. computerassociatesvoip.com

16. earnmillionswithvoip.com

17. envoiprive.com

18. forum-voip.net

19. free-month-voip-phone.com

20. free-month-voip.com

21. icenetvoip.com

22. icenetvoip.net

23. idvoip.net

24. indovoip.com

25. internationalvoip.net

26. lgvoip.com

27. localvoip.net

28. mobilevoipcalls.com

29. mobilevoipsolutions.com

30. myvoipmail.net

31. myvoipresource.com

32. necvoipsupport.com

33. onevoip.net

34. phone-services-voip.com

35. protocolvoip.com

36. redevoip.com

37. residential-voip.org

38. sbc-voip.com

39. small-business-voip.com

40. small-business-voip.org

41. thevoipresource.com

42. tollfreevoip.net

43. verizon-voip.org

44. veteranvoip.com

45. voip-advantage.com

46. voip-broadband-phone-service.com

47. voip-comparison.org

48. voip-internet-phone.org

49. voip-line.com

50. voip-pc-phone.com

51. voip-price.org

52. voip-prices.com

53. voip-provider-comparison.com

54. voip-vendor.org

55. voipandinternetphones.com

56. voipbroker.com

57. voipbythehour.com

58. voipcalltracking.com

59. voipcoders.com

60. voipconsultant.net

61. voipcy.com

62. voipetcplus.com

63. voipfreelancers.com

64. voipgoglobal.com

65. voipinternational.net

66. voipld.net

67. voiplocal.net

68. voipology.net

69. voiporig.com

70. voiporig.net

71. voiporigination.com

72. voiporigination.net

73. voipphoneservices.com

74. voippost.com

75. voiprally.com

76. voiprebuild.com

77. voipresellers.biz

78. voipresellers.info

79. voipresellers.org

80. voipseek.com

81. voipshieldsystems.com

82. voipshieldsystems.net

83. voipshieldsystems.org

84. voiptollfree.net

85. voipvoyage.com

86. voipwholesale.net

87. voyagevoip.com

88. wesellvoip.net

89. wirelessvoipproducts.com

90. world-voip.net

91. amerivoip.com

92. kt-voip.com

93. realcheapvoip.com

94. reallycheapvoip.com

95. voipcomponent.com

96. voipcore.com

97. voipetc.com

98. voipforisp.com

99. voipforisp.net

100. voipforisps.com

101. voipforisps.net

102. voipint.net

103. voippump.com

104. voiptonic.com

105. voipwizerd.com

106. voipwizerd.net

107. zjvoip.com