January 2006 Archives

I got a hold of this trends piece and thought it worth passing on. I like it. It is kind of a mix between article and advertorial but is still educational:

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SOS Spots Hot Trends in IP Telephony for 2006

By Gia McNutt, chief executive officer, SOS

Don't you wish you had a crystal ball to foresee the path of IP Telephony in 2006? You're in luck. SOS has already spotted five sizzling trends that will make companies more effective, not just more efficient.

Crystal Ball Prediction #1 - Business applications converge onto one IP infrastructure.

Most large U.S. companies have already switched from plain old telephone systems to voice over Internet protocol. Now small and medium-size businesses are also choosing voice over IP (VoIP) to give their people "anytime, anywhere" voice, video and data communications. As more and more midsized businesses rely on one IP infrastructure, convergence -- integration of applications with the network -- can't be ignored, says leading Gartner analyst Katie Hackler.

"When you start to think about all the applications that you have to put together on a case-by-case basis, it's costing you time, it's costing you money and it's adding complexity," says Hackler. "As we start moving to more of an IP environment, then you start having more commonality to build on."

Chief information officers need to integrate rather than compartmentalize networks, she said.
That's why American River Bankshares turned to SOS for help. A northern California bank with multiple branches, American River needed a robust, reliable, integrated business communications environment that would pay for itself after implementation.

To start, SOS assessed and upgraded the bank's network by implementing Citrix Server-Based computing technology, which centralized data and reduced network traffic over the local area network (LAN) and wide area network (WAN). Now the network has redundancies built in to ensure continuous uptime and peace of mind for top managers.

Instead of replacing desktop computers companywide, SOS engineers improved the performance of existing desktops in order to extend their lives. As a result, the bank got better desktop and network functionality while spending less on support and administration.

Over time, users at American River shifted to working on thin client terminals instead of personal computers. These terminals are significantly cheaper than PCs and easy to install. SOS had already installed an NEC business phone system several years ago with unified messaging, and launched a program of comprehensive support services for the bank. As new technology became available, SOS stayed close to the bank and expanded on the initial solution by implementing a Call Manager site.

Crystal Ball Prediction #2: The number of VoIP access lines will grow through 2008.

VoIP is not a flash in the pan. Roughly three-quarters of large companies in the U.S. have already made the switch to IP telephony, to the dismay of the traditional phone companies. Companies have lowered bandwidth costs, reduced personnel requirements, saved on taxes and spent less on moving, adding and changing phone lines.

Global Cash Access, a Las Vegas company that provides credit checks for local casinos, is a prime example of a midsized company that migrated to VoIP and hit the jackpot.

In only six months after installing a new IP capability on the back end, Global Cash Access saw a 63 percent decline in agent-handled calls and a similar decrease in call waiting time. The company projected a $600,000 cost savings in the first year as well as improved customer service, and expects even more benefits in the future as the IP functionality is extended more to the front end.

The most important aspect of VoIP is that it is growing and is here to stay. VoIP "now represent the 'dial tone' for the future," says Ken Dulaney, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner.

Crystal Ball Prediction #3: Business intelligence will make companies smarter

The largest city travel and tourism website, VEGAS.com, knows firsthand what business intelligence can do for a company and its profitability. "VEGAS.com opened up new revenue streams and made their services that much more available to anyone regardless of their communication method," said Rob Cate, director of contact center operations for VEGAS.com. "Because of SOS's recommendation for real-time business intelligence, our customers can now contact agents through voice communications, fax and email interactions, web chat, screen pop-up dialogue, voice message and recording, and much more."

Before they even pick up the call, the agents already have information at their fingertips, such as who is calling, the time of the call, and purchase history.

Crystal Ball Prediction #4: Adoption of VoIP continues, especially with small and midsize businesses

No one wants to be a guinea pig when it comes to adopting new technology, especially small to medium-sized businesses. In the past, they had concerns about cost, implementation hassles and complexity associated with changing over to IP. But now those barriers to adoption are more about perception than reality.

Small and medium-sized businesses are now becoming more aware of the advantages that VoIP has to offer, such as extending the life of desktops, centralizing data, reducing support and administration costs, and minimizing network traffic over the LAN and WAN. They see that boundaries separating voice, video, data and mobile communications are falling.

Yankee Group indicates that small and medium businesses are rapidly transitioning to VoIP. Making business calls is becoming easier, more efficient and cheaper, causing 70 percent of businesses to give preference to VoIP solutions.

Crystal Ball Prediction #5: Security and regulatory issues will be more important than ever

Security and compliance issues will be top of mind for businesses in 2006. For over a decade, SOS has developed strategies to secure voice communications.

One effective strategy is to harden the voice environment by separating the virtual local area networks (VLANs). Deploying VoIP devices on separate VLANs utilizes quality of service (QoS) resources and allows dividing data traffic from voice and signaling traffic. Because VLANS can be set up for different types of voice and data traffic and devices, some believe that VLANs provide increased security, precious time for troubleshooters to address voice quality issues, and flexibility to set QoS markings in the packet, not the VLAN.

About the writer

Gia McNutt, chief executive officer of SOS, is an expert in integrated advanced communications solutions for business. Her company, SOS, supplies voice, data, and telephony management services to clients such as Vegas.com, the largest city travel and tourism web site in the world. For over a decade, McNutt's company, SOS, has consistently ranked among the Fastest Growing Companies in its region. Her team has designed and implemented more than 100 state of the art IP telephony solutions - connecting tens of thousands of users in dozens of states. SOS is headquartered in Rocklin, California with sales offices in the northwest. Reach SOS at 888-336-7671 or 916-632-8800. Gain access to the company's latest case studies, news, and IP telephony solutions and services at www.team-sos.com

VoIP is indeed becoming more international by the day. In fact at the recent ITEXPO show in Ft. Lauderdale, 89 countries were represented. Thank you all for attending Internet Telephony Conference & Expo and making the event the one place you come to make purchasing decisions. Thanks to all the people that came to the event from the following countries:

1 Albania
2 Angola
3 Argentina
4 Australia
5 Austria
6 Bahamas
7 Bahrain
8 Bangladesh
9 Barbados
10 Belgium
11 Bermuda
12 Bolivia
13 Brazil
14 Burkina-Faso
15 Cameroon
16 Canada
17 Chile
18 China Peoples Rep
19 Colombia
20 Costa Rica
21 Cyprus
22 Dominica
23 Dominican Republic
24 Ecuador
25 Egypt (Arab Rep of)
26 El Salvador
27 Estonia
28 Finland
29 France
30 Germany
31 Ghana
32 Guadeloupe
33 Guatemala
34 Guyana
35 Haiti
36 Honduras
37 Hong Kong
38 Iceland
39 India
40 Indonesia
41 Iran
42 Ireland Republic of
43 Israel
44 Italy
45 Ivory
46 Jamaica
47 Japan
48 Kenya
49 Korea South-Rep. of
50 Kuwait
51 Lebanon
52 Libya
53 Mexico
54 Mongolia
55 Morocco
56 Myanmar (Burma)
57 Netherlands
58 New Zealand
59 Nicaragua
60 Niger
61 Nigeria
62 Norway
63 Pakistan
64 Panama
65 Peru
66 Philippines
67 Portugal
68 Puerto Rico
69 Romania
70 Russian Federation
71 Singapore
72 Slovenia
73 South Africa
74 Spain
75 Sri Lanka
76 St Kitts-Nevis
77 St Lucia
78 Sweden
79 Switzerland
80 Taiwan (China Rep of)
81 Thailand
82 Trinidad & Tobago
83 United Arab Emirates
84 United Kingdom
85 USA
86 Venezuela
87 Vietnam
88 Yemen Arab Republic
89 Yugoslavia

Here is a great mashup idea. Let's have a mashup of all cell phone dead spots to potentially get carriers to fix them. I would prefer spending on a perfect network as opposed to the billions of wasted TV ads touting each network as the best.

James Seng comments on the goings on at RIM and how a simple patent issue could have gone away a long time ago. Apparently Research in Motion co-founder, President and CEO Mike Lazaridis just doesn't like to compromise. Now the company is in what appears to be a deep hole with the only hope of escape being tremendous sums of cash. Pity RIM shareholders who thought the company's success ensured a stock chart that went up indefinitely.

TMC's Customer Interaction Solutions (CIS) Magazine has been ranking the teleservices outsourcers for more than two decades bestowing the coveted Top 50 award to these companies. Another of our business units is the Internet Telephony brand. Sometimes these two brands cross over. This happens in the case of IP contact centers or hosted contact center solutions or call centers dedicated to telecommunications carriers.

Now we have yet another example as West Corporation a world leader in teleservices outsourcing has purchased Intrado a world leader in 911 solutions. There are many synergies between these two companies yet this is perhaps the most unlikely combinations of companies I can think of.

There are tremendous opportunities for both West and Intrado. It will be very interesting to see how this plays out.

I spend at leas 30% of my time traveling. Quite often I receive e-mails from travel companies while on the road. I am on the mailing list for many hotels and airlines. What I find interesting is that while staying at hotel brand X, I receive e-mail from the same hotel brand telling me about specials in other hotels the company owns.

The one missing ingredient in my opinion is a thank you. I think these e-mails should be personalized and thank me for staying in the hotel as the e-mail is being sent. Sure this is more work but as a customer in a Brand X hotel it seems common courtesy to thank me for using the hotel, every time I am reached out to.

The concept needs to be embodied by the airlines and Amtrak as well. I just think it is good customer service.

While driving in Florida I noticed a number of toll booths with ads from Geico. I have nothing against the company. As Warren Buffet is a fan of TMCnet, I naturally am a fan of Geico.

My thoughts don't really pertain to Geico anyway but I got to thinking about how the public sector competes with the private sector. I suppose advertising on toll booths is a great way to get to the same audience you would reach with billboards. I wonder what Clear Channel thinks of all this.

Of course this competition is not isolated as Fedex and UPS compete with the USPS. In fact the government forbids the other carriers access to PO boxes -- something you may deem extremely anticompetitive.

On the one hand I applaud the entrepreneurial spirit of government workers who realize they can make money from myriad sponsorships in subways and tolls but on the other hand there seems to be something unfair about the situation.

When it comes to trade shows, the majority of convention centers are generally all owned by city governments so in this case the government allows shows to take place.

So I guess we need the government in some cases to allow us to conduct business. The US government is responsible for the Internet for example. But I suppose it is healthy to wonder if the government may be going too far in competing with media companies as they try everything they can to increase their income.

I was surprised beyond belief when a coworker sent me our latest Alexa ranking. I honestly must say I am blown away. Not only did TMC put on an event that most every exhibitor told me was one of the best expos they have ever exhibited at (yes, ever!) But now I see TMCnet's record-setting one-day ranking.

Are you ready for this?? 946!! That is TMCnet's record. We recent hit 1,000 and that was cause for celebration. Now we have done even better. Remember this means that TMCnet was in the top 946 websites in the world for this day! For a b2b site this is unheard of. For a b2b technology site this is especially unheard of.

In short this number was a long-term goal for TMCnet. I would have guessed it would have taken many years to hit this number. Alexa ranking gets exponentially more difficult to lower as you get down to these numbers. My web team deserves a great deal of credit for producing a site that is ranking so well. Thanks team!

To give you an idea how this compares with other sites I took a look to see how TV networks CBS and NBC rank. Here is the comparison:




As you can see, TMCnet is making rapid progress towards these major television networks (two networks I have tremendous respect and admiration for by the way). You can try this comparison for yourself if you like.

Here are the stats from all three sites:


Traffic Rank for tmcnet.com (what's this)

Traffic Rank for cbs.com (what's this)

Traffic Rank for nbc.com (what's this)

If there is a single trend I have observed this week it is that VoIP is really happening. I spent a good deal of time interviewing companies exhibiting at the Internet Telephony show and they told me that the buyers at this show are more serious than ever. Many companies are selling product on the show floor.

I am further blown away by the international nature of VoIP. This week I have seen more and more service providers and enterprises coming from Africa, Asia, Latin America and everywhere else.

At the networking receptions the most frequent discussions I heard were about SIP, IMS, SOA and VoIP security. There was discussion about Skype being blocked in China as well.

If this event is any indication of how 2006 is going to shape up for the VoIP industry then we are all in great shape. I didn't see one aisle that was easy to walk down the entire show. The frenzy of buying activity was amazing to me. Now is a great time to be in VoIP.

For those of us you that made it through post-bubble VoIP, it seems we are really back. We have really accomplished what we set out to do. People believe in this technology and are deploying in huge numbers.

SIP Magazine is here! Thanks to all of you that helped make this publication possible incuding my fellow TMC team members and those of you in the industry that helped support this new magazine. On to IMS Magazine which debuts next in February (yes, one month away).

I am really looking forward to meeting Ron Insana today. I have been an avid CNBC fan for years – perhaps a decade or so. I can’t wait to hear what Insana has to say. I have noticed that many of the big-name keynoters at ITEXPO are really loose on stage and seem much less scripted than on TV. This is always great as you don’t want scripted keynotes. I expect Ron and Insana and Tom Ridge tomorrow to do amazing jobs. So far I have learned a great deal from the few keynotes that have taken place. I am looking forward to learning more this week at the show.

There have been a slew of announcements this week from the Avaya/AT&T announcement to the XConnect VoIP peering news. The exhibit hall opens tonight so there should be even more excitement. I can’t wait. So far the attendance at the show has far exceeded everyone’s expectations. I hope you get a chance to come down to Ft. Lauderdale this week and see VoIP 2.0 in action.