VoIP Blog - Tehrani.com

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Tech Data

 

I will speaking at this Tech Data conference next week (I will just find any excuse to go to Florida in the winter :-)

The reseller opportunity in VoIP is huge and this is an area we focus on extensively at ITEXPO as well. If you can’t wait for the Internet Telephony show be sure to come hear me speak next week on how you can make money in the VoIP market and where the future of VoIP lies.

Interested resellers can contact Robert Pell at 800-237-8931 ext. 79284 or robert.pell@techdata.com to receive an invitation.

Telephony Solutions Workshop

...for you and your customer!

Wednesday January 11, 2006
8:00am - 4:00pm

Breakfast, lunch and free parking will be provided!
Arrive before 8am and double your chances to receive prizes!

The Fort Lauderdale Marriott North
6650 North Andrews Avenue
Fort Lauderdale, FL 33309

Speak with representatives of leading manufacturers of Voice over IP, Videoconferencing, and IP Telephony products. Participate in breakout sessions with hands-on demonstrations, and learn the benefits and financial rewards of these exciting technologies. In addition, you will meet your Tech Data Telephony team.

You have the option to bring one of your customers along if you would like!

Don't miss Rich Tehrani, President and Group Editor-in-Chief of Technology Marketing Corporation, speak on the state of the industry. Tehrani is a respected communications technology expert specializing in various leading edge technologies, and he is frequently quoted in newspapers and is a featured technology editor on Washington DC's top-rated WMAL radio station. Tehrani holds a computer hardware and software engineering degree from the University of Connecticut and frequently speaks at industry events, and also has been appointed as a speaker at many user group meetings for companies such as Rockwell, Inter-Tel and Empirix.

Do you want to know how to obtain credit from banks and suppliers?
Jennifer Griffin, Tech Data Senior Credit Manager has the secrets.
Jennifer will be presenting "How to Keep From Getting Voted Off Credit Island".

As a thank you from our sponsoring vendors and Tech Data, you will be entered to win great prizes !

Don't miss out - space is limited!

AGENDA: 

8:00 a.m.	Registration and Continental Breakfast
8:30 a.m.	Telephony Business Unit Advantages Doug Ellingsworth, Tech Data Southeastern Territory Manager
9:00 a.m.	VoIP Presentation Rich Tehrani, President of Technology Marketing Corporation
9:30 a.m.	Credit Presentation Jennifer Griffin, Tech Data Senior Credit Manager
10:00 a.m.	Hands on Demonstrations (3Com, APC, Castelle, Cisco, Mitel, Nortel and Polycom)
12:25p.m.	Lunch
1:10 p.m.	Hands on Demonstrations (3Com, APC, Castelle, Cisco, Mitel, Nortel and Polycom)
3:00 p.m.	Tech Data Enterprise Solutions Center Demonstration Robert Pell, Tech Data Senior Vendor Product Representative
3:15 p.m.	Ice cream social and give away

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Deploying New Services

I received this article recently from Lucent. It is an article about Lucent services but it nevertheless is worthy of reading as it details some next generation services we will be seeing service providers deploy in the future. For example I like the idea of video greetings that can be sent via “virtual characters.”

I also like the idea of celebrity greetings and certainly these are being rolled out slowly but surely. I think many people would love a Donald Trump greeting that says “Thanks for calling… To avoid getting fired leave a detailed message after the tone.”

There is more to the article but if you are intrigued so far, give it a read and feel free to leave your comments at the bottom.

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The Secret to Success in the Vast Applications Market

Lucent Hosted Services: A New Business Model for Success

Keith Chappell, Managing Vice President and Global Practice Leader
Lucent Worldwide Services, Communications Applications

There are three prongs for success in the applications market: Increase revenue, lower costs and improve time to market for new and innovative end-user applications.

Service providers, virtual network operators and ISPs can answer these challenges by adopting a hosted applications strategy. Vendors such as Lucent are starting to change the game by tailoring applications around their customers’ needs. With new hosted VoIP, security, email and a wide array of other multimedia communications, customers can add hosted offerings to their services mix, helping them give their enterprise and business customers the flexibility, control and increased revenue they want without the risk and costs they don‘t.

For example, Lucent has built the Hosted Custom Applications Center, which works with customers to create and customize applications that will differentiate them from their competitors. Lucent can integrate the application into the customer‘s network infrastructure or host the application through Lucent’s Global Network Operations Centers (GNOCs), ensuring reliability and security.

Through Hosted Applications, things like facilities operation, applications performance management and capacity planning can be rolled into the ‘pay-as-you-grow’ pricing to further reduce service provider risk and time to market. In addition, customers can rest easy, knowing Lucent’s trained professionals are managing their applications through our world-class GNOCs.

LWS‘ Hosted Applications offerings include:

• Video Greetings – Creative and entertaining video messages that can be sent via Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), Short Message Service (SMS), Web or email. This application features Pulse‘s Veepers™, which enables the creation and deployment of virtual characters.

• Celebrity Greetings – Unique and personalized audio greeting cards as incoming or outgoing messages on your voice mail systems;

• Location Based Services (iLocator Services) – applications, including “friend finder” and driving directions, that capitalizes on user presence, location and availability;

• MiRing Back – Downloadable ringback tones; and

• AnyPath Messaging Solution – a seamless communications experience for the end user with access through any device for audio and video message storage and retrieval.

As end-users continue to demand the most innovative and new applications, it becomes more and more clear that applications are revolutionizing the industry. Lucent is also continuing to evolve its applications so service providers can satisfy their customers with the most cutting-edge, revenue-driving applications available.

At any given time, service providers are being bombarded with hundreds of application opportunities, and most simply do not have the operational or financial capacity to evaluate, finance, and deploy even a small fraction of these. The decisions these operators have to make become even more confusing when considering the tremendous uncertainty regarding which applications users will adopt, how much they would be willing to pay for them and how long they will potentially hold their interest.

Even for those few service providers that have the capacity to simultaneously roll-out every application that comes their way using their existing deployment approaches, likelihood is that they would lose money as the return generated by the handful of successful applications would far from offset the sizable upfront investment in the remainder.

The answer to this dilemma lies in a three-pronged approach to applications deployment.

First Prong: Service Delivery Platform Approach

Service providers should be moving away from the current model of fully integrated applications deployments towards a more economically attractive paradigm: an environment in which new applications can be plugged and unplugged more quickly and affordably. This is frequently referred to as a Service Delivery Platform approach.

This increasingly popular approach allows common support elements and functional modules - such as subscriber databases, provisioning interfaces and billing interfaces - to be easily accessed via Applications Programming Interfaces (APIs), and negates the need to replicate each of these modules every time a provider wishes to deploy a new application. In effect, service providers gain the ability to bring new applications to market much more rapidly and cost-effectively than they do today. Not only that, but they can also be disconnected with more ease. The IMS infrastructure, which many service provider are currently exploring, is complementary toward these goals, providing API’s to common application data and allowing a seamless applications experience across many different access domains and devices.

Second Prong: The “Pay As You Grow” Model

Subsequently, service providers should choose to leverage new business and supplier pricing models that transfer some of the market and technology risks to the supplier community and across the industry at large. New pricing models might include transaction and subscription-based pricing coupled with revenue sharing. These are effectively “pay-as-you-grow” pricing agreements that ensure service providers maintain a positive cash flow with both successful and unsuccessful applications. By adding a Hosted Applications business proposition and delivery model to the equation, service providers are also able to bring new applications to market much greater speed. With the advent of Hosted Applications, facilities operation, applications performance management and capacity planning can be rolled into the “pay-as-you-grow” pricing to further reduce service provider risk and time to market.

Third Prong: Monitoring Your Network

The third prong of a successful market launch approach should be to implement a rigorous and disciplined monitoring process so that the service provider can quickly understand which applications are going to be successful and what is driving that success. This monitoring process should also ascertain trends in the demographic characteristics of the end user base, cross correlations with other applications usage, price elasticities, and other adoption parameters. This added information will enable considerably more effective service marketing and will allow providers to quickly adjust service definition and packaging to optimize utility for end users and maximize their profitability.

End Result

By adopting these approaches, service providers will be poised to reap winning applications, while also quickly replacing less successful applications with more useful ones. The new deployment environment will be both highly effective and will also offer a rapid learning capability that over time will increase success rates as providers gain a better understanding of the drivers of applications market success - and only bring to market those applications that fit this pattern. The financial returns should be enormous.

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TMCnet: 10 Million Page Views

TMCnet: reached 9,945,852 million page views in December 2005 according to WebTrends. This is an all-time high for our site. A page view is basically as the name implies a single page being viewed. So if a person comes to TMCnet and reads 5 articles, they generate 5 page views. As mentioned above, this is the largest number of page views our site has ever experienced and we are on track (fingers crossed) to shatter this number in January 2006.

Thanks for your support and being a loyal reader of TMCnet including our channels and more recently introduced IP Communications and Information Technology sites.

Please also remember that you can sign up for news alerts and/or XML/RSS feeds for any word or phrase you like. You can track Cisco, VoIP, SIP or your company or your competition. The news alerts pull from hundreds of thousands of feeds and articles including those written by the huge stable of TMC reporters and contributors.

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Flextronics

The first issue of SIP Magazine will contain my Publisher’s Outlook which in turn will consist of a brief interview with Anjali Gupta, Corporate Marketing, Flextronics Software Systems as well as other SIP thought leaders. Here is the interview with Gupta:

1. Where is the SIP market headed?

SIP has become ubiquitous in the last couple of years for developers of next generation networks.  The industry has witnessed the emergence of a new breed of alternate carriers, who are growing at a tremendous pace, by betting on IP for providing innovative value added services. This will continue to fuel unprecedented growth in SIP at least for the next couple of years.

2. What are your expectations or estimates for the growth of the SIP market?

SIP will continue to enjoy broad adoption, at least for the next few years, and is expected to witness a solid double-digit growth. The current SIP enabling technologies market is estimated at $33M and expected to grow beyond $100M in the next five years (CAGR > 30%).

Though enterprise segment was the first to witness broad adoption; SIP network infrastructure market as a whole, currently estimated at $4B is expected to grow beyond $10B by 2009 (CAGR > 30%) with both incumbent carriers and CLEC’s embracing SIP.

3. How does the development of SIP affect your product plans?

The broad adoption of SIP enables Flextronics Software Systems (FSS), the largest vendor of SIP Enabling Technologies (SIP stacks, toolkits, and frameworks) with over 200 OEM customers, to further strengthen its position as the leading SIP vendor, and introduce innovative products, both for OEM’s and carriers. These ingeniously designed products enable OEM’s to roll-out innovative solutions that can be rapidly deployed thereby facilitating SIP adoption.

4. How do your customers benefit from SIP?

SIP has become the de-facto standard. It provides better value for end customers by providing imperatives such as multi-media, presence, device independence and instant messaging capabilities. As a result, carriers can increase their efficiency by migrating to SIP and provide an enhanced user experience to reduce churn and increase ARPU.

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SIP Magazine

This month, TMC launches SIP Magazine. I am elated about this launch and the industry has echoed my feelings. I have had extensive conversations with the true leaders in the world of SIP and they think the time is right for us to have launched this publication.

Here is my Publisher’s Outlook from the first issue of SIP magazine, January 2006. You will notice there are interviews as well which I will blog separately and probably individually. Feel free to post your comments on SIP and what you think about what I wrote for the first issue.

Our SIP Future

By Rich Tehrani

We are on the verge of entering into a world of united communications where we will be able to reach each other more effectively than ever before, regardless of device, operating system, or network. We will simply communicate without the need to worry about scrambling for lists of phone numbers or other unique identifiers tied to today’s devices and networks. We will know when the person we want to reach is available and we won’t be constantly interrupted during meetings and other important events if we choose to be unavailable. The new world of communications will be much better than it is today. We will be happier. We will be more productive. We will take control of communications - not the other way around.

One of the engines driving this future of simplified communications is SIP.

SIP stands for session initiation protocol, and is used extensively in instant messaging, voice, and video conversations. Furthermore it is at the core of IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem), an architecture designed to allow wireless and wireline service providers to provide next generation services in an integrated fashion.

SIP is the protocol that helps us be accessible anywhere and everywhere - on our terms. It allows us to stay connected to corporate PBXs regardless of location and lets corporations purchase SIP-based VoIP trunks to connect to their PBXs – eliminating the need for traditional voice T1s and related equipment.

SIP is the standard protocol for human communications of the future. It is a peer to peer protocol, meaning it does not need a centralized server to work but can interface with such a server if needed, for example, in a service provider implementation.

SIP is powerful and SIP is complicated. SIP can drastically reduce communications costs and increase communications speed and efficiency.

This magazine is devoted to the world of SIP. Our aim is to educate you on the latest developments regarding SIP and to help you understand how the products on the market can help you save money, make money, become more efficient, etc… depending on your needs.

TMC has been publishing magazines in the technology space since 1972. We launched the first magazine in call center space in 1982, Customer Interaction Solutions; the first magazine in the VoIP space in 1998, Internet Telephony; and now the first magazine in SIP. Thank you for you loyal readership over the decades. We promise that this magazine will be the objective voice of SIP and will help you to do your job better.

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Rates Technology and Mitel

I recently received this e-mail regarding Mitel and Rates Technology. The e-mail came from Simon Gwatkin, VP Strategic Marketing Mitel Networks.

Hi Rich,

I read your blog (and others) re the Rates Technology lawsuits. I noticed the mention that we were being sued for $945 million! Just to put the record straight, Mitel has an agreement with Rates Technology that prevents Rates from suing Mitel or any of its direct or indirect customers and end-users for the sale or use of any and all Mitel products in the past or in the future.

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New Netcentrex CEO

Netcentrex has been doing a great job growing and their penetration in VoIP and triple-play solutions has increased nicely over the years. They now have a new CEO.

David Michaud has been appointed new CEO with responsibility for the Americas market. If you do not already know David, he has extensive experience in this market including founding or leading roles with Taqua, NexTone, Excel, and Carrius.

He brings almost 25 years of telecommunications experience, a proven track record of establishing new telecom companies, and extensive experience accelerating their growth. Recently he led sales and marketing initiatives for startups in the IP networking business, including Carrius and NexTone Communications.

In 1997 he founded and became Chairman and CEO of Taqua Systems, a telecommunications switch developer sold to Tekelec for $85 million in March 2004. From 1992 to 1995 Michaud served as head of sales and marketing at Excel Communications where he grew the company six-fold in three years, becoming the leader in the programmable switch market and providing a foundation for the eventual $1.7 billion acquisition by Lucent Technologies.

His career also includes positions at DSC Communications, AT&T Bell Labs, Southwestern Bell, and IBM. He holds an MBA from Washington University, St. Louis and a BS from Carroll College.

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68 Countries Register For ITEXPO

I just got word that people from over 68 countries will be attending Internet Telephony Conference & Expo. VoIP growth is really taking off and this is such a worldwide phenomenon that I am not surprised to see such large international registration. I just can’t wait for this event which I have dubbed the UN of VoIP in the past.

As I drove into work today on sheets of dangerous and well camouflaged black ice, my thermometer said 28 degrees. I am just 20 days away from going down to sunny Florida for ITEXPO.

Here are the countries represented so far:

 

Angola
Argentina
Australia
Austria
Bahamas
Bahrain
Bangladesh
Barbados
Belgium
Bermuda
Brazil
Burkina-Faso
Cameroon
Canada
Chile
Colombia
Costa Rica
Cyprus
Dominica
Ecuador
Finland
France
Germany
Ghana
Guadeloupe
Guatemala
Guyana
Honduras
Hong Kong
Iceland
India
Indonesia
Ireland Republic of
Israel
Italy
Ivory
Jamaica
Japan
Kenya
Korea South-Rep. of
Lebanon
Mexico
New Zealand
Nicaragua
Niger
Nigeria
Pakistan
Panama
Peru
Philippines
Portugal
Romania
Singapore
Slovenia
South Africa
Spain
Sri Lanka
St Lucia
Sweden
Taiwan (China Rep of)
Trinidad & Tobago
United Arab Emirates
United Kingdom
USA
Venezuela
Vietnam
Yemen Arab Republic
Yugoslavia

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Vonage Chooses Sonus

I still can’t stop thinking about how many people in the year 2002 when the telecom market was in a perilous time told me that service providers all buy Lucent. Sure they will trial anything and everything else but when they deploy they go with Lucent.

How wrong these people were. Companies like Sonus are doing a great job a getting service providers – new and incumbent, to choose their solutions. Vonage has already deployed Sonus solutions in LA and New York… Now they will deploy Sonus around the country and world to help support their meteoric growth.

The specific products Vonage has and will continue to deploy from Sonus are the GSX9000, PSX Call Routing Server, SGX Signaling Gateway, and the Sonus Insight Management System. This release really helps Sonus’ position as one of the leading providers of next-gen switching equipment.

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Milliondollarhomepage Copycats

Everyone who is anyone is after Milliondollarhomepage. Especially after the news got out about the last few pixels being auctioned off for over $20,000. What I find fascinating is how many pitches I have seen on my blog and on the wires for competitive offerings to this pixel ad based site. Now a new one has popped up. Wait 5 minutes and a few more will arrive on the scene as well. I believe “Start a pixel ad site” was a common resolution this past New Year’s day.

Here is a release I just received:

Million Dollar Homepage Spawns New Genre of Online Adverstising called Pixel Ads

Pixel Ads are the new advertising medium of preference due to their low cost and high value. While their popularity has increased the cost, sites like www.DotAds.net help bargain shoppers find the value that made pixel advertising popular.

(PRWEB) January 4, 2006 -- A young college student earning money for school has taken the advertising world by storm and in the process created an entirely new genre of advertising called Pixel Advertising or "Pixel Ads". While banner ads are nothing new, the process was often complicated. Alex Tew has managed to simplify the process to a one dollar per pixel fee and the idea has made him a millionaire nearly overnight. With delighted customers and staggering traffic statistics for the $1-per-pixel ads, his site has effectively sold out.

However, those looking to get in on this innovative and cost-effective medium have other options and in many cases can find even cheaper options. While the last 1,000 pixels on the original Million Dollar Homepage are going for over $20,000 on eBay, there are much better bargains to be found on the net if you know where to look. Your first stop should be www.DotAds.net, which is a website dedicated to helping advertisers navigate the pixel ad jungle. In addition to scouting out the best bargains, it also has a guide on how to create your own ads, how to avoid the pitfalls of the industry, and even how to highlight and draw attention to your ad in the sea of color. David Booth of DotAds.net believes value and differentiation of your ad is the key to success: "1 million pixels is a lot of ads. To get meaningful traffic you should have an effective color scheme and creative text to pique the interest of the viewers that obviously many other ads competing for their attention." David also believes like any industry, there will be tiered pricing: "Pixel ads are great because you get a lot of bang for your buck. But some sites, such as the eBay auction for the Million Dollar Homepage, are simply overpriced and out of the spending range of most companies. I suggest to my customers to find a high quality, reasonably priced site such as www.DollarPerDot.com, which sells ads at $0.10 (ten cents) per pixel. At those prices you can get a much bigger ad, which will grab a lot more attention and give you a much higher return on investment." Time will tell if this genre will be the next internet revolution or a footnote, but as Anu Murty of www.DollarPerDot.com asks: "For $0.10 can your company avoid to ignore it?"


Webshare, LLC is an internet consulting company based in Phoenix, AZ, specializing in search engine marketing and internet trend analysis. www.WebshareDesign.com

You may also want to check out Tom Keating’s comments on pixel ads.

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