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Vonage and Avaya

The old adage of eating  one’s dog food is what is referred to when a company uses its own products internally. This is exactly what I thought of when I saw the announcement from Avaya that Vonage will be using their IP contact center solutions that are based on SIP. Is there a more synergistic merging of a company’s business model and the technology they choose to deploy in their customer-facing applications? I don’t think so.

This is an amazing example of how Vonage will be able to take a giant leap forward in customer service. I still hear complaints about Vonage service but didn’t experience any problems with customer service while I was a customer. I did have major problems getting my local number portability issues resolved but the service up until that point was excellent.

Now that Vonage has IP enabled their agents, they can provide killer applications to their customers such as the ability to escalate a chat to a call, enable video during a call and more. Here is part of the release that the companies put out today:

Based on Avaya Customer Interaction Suite and powered by Avaya Communication Manager IP Telephony software, the main contact center will serve as a hub for other customer care centers as they open around the world. The integration of SIP into Avaya solutions heightens interoperability with other Vonage applications and networks. Additionally, new SIP-based capabilities in Avaya's Customer Interaction Suite can enable Vonage agents to establish buddy lists of fellow agents or experts located anywhere in the business who could be quickly tapped through presence and instant messaging while a customer is on the line.

Everyone tells me Vonage’s churn numbers are too high. As they are the trailblazer in VoIP, I am not sure how we can determine what the proper churn number should be. This purchase of Avaya equipment is by definition a big financial commitment to improved customer service by the company and may also signal that the rumored purchase of Vonage could be a long way off. Would you spend all this money on new equipment just before you are acquired? Probably not. I would expect the ROI of this acquisition to be a year or more. Perhaps there will be some M&A news then or the company will go public.

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Adelphia Founder Rigas Sentenced to 15 Years in Prison

How much is enough? When you are a successful executive in the cable TV industry and you are making a nice healthy living, do you need to go out and defraud investors by using corporate money to purchase jet trips, cars and golf club memberships? Does it make sense to buy a $25 swath of land to protect the view from your house on the shareholder’s dime?

Well if your goal in life is to spend your remaining years behind bars then you should do all of the above and be just like John Rigas the founder of Adelphia Communications Corp. who just received 15 years in prison for doing all of the above.

We probably recall how this story ended – a company is bankrupt and sold off to others and shareholders – as they often do, lost out.
As seen in the LA Times.

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Zennstrom Repeats Groundbreaking Keynote at ITEXPO

Last fall, Niklas Zennstrom honored TMC by choosing our show, Internet Telephony Conference & Expo to speak at via videoconference. This was his first-ever keynote in the US. His talk was very insightful and part of the buzz in the room when he was done was the SIP standard and how Skype doesn’t support it. There was also amazement as how many subscribers were on the network.

Here is Tom Keating’s take on the Skype - Zennstrom keynote.

We are very excited to be announcing that Niklas Zennstrom will once again be keynoting at Internet Telephony Conference & Expo in LA via videoconference. So much has happened in the past year and Skype has had over 123 million downloads as I sit to write this blog entry.

Skype still doesn’t support SIP and the industry buzz is that Skype will eventually license their protocol to cell phone makers and get a dollar for every cell phone sold. Whether this is true or not is anyone’s guess but it makes for some interesting food for thought and I am excited to get Zennstrom’s viewpoints on where his incredible success in VoIP software will take him  next.

He made some big announcements at our show last year and I expect he will make even bigger ones this year.

As a side note, it is refreshing to see that when we decided to choose the name Internet Telephony for a magazine and conference name back in 1996 that now almost ten years later, the concept is alive and well and the term is being embraced by true industry pioneers like Zennstrom.

Registration is open for ITEXPO and we will have the best conference program of any communications event in my opinion. Believe me, there has never been so much effort put into a conference program at TMC and we have been putting on VoIP conferences since 1986!

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