November 2006 Archives

Endless Fields of Clouds

November 17, 2006 5:15 PM | 0 Comments

There is something absolutely serene about clouds. On this particular flight the heating system seems limited and you actually feel like you are outside. Did I mention it is around 40 degrees out? And that's on the ground. As this posts I am on the way home getting ready for another trip to arctic weather next week.



Oh and by the way I snapped a shot of passengers with coats on. The flight attendant has one on as well.


But my frost-induced diversion comes to an end as I reflect on the following. Recently TMC has worked with some IP communications companies on integrated marketing programs and these companies have seen their stock prices double and in one case quadruple. This while the comparable companies in the customer's spaces saw their stocks drop.



When I am not spending time with my family or writing there is nothing like partnering with a company to help them grow their sales rapidly. Today I met with a company who is going to be working very closely with TMC and I can't wait to help them grow as well. It is fun to share in the success of your customers.



This weekend I hope to catch up on article and blog writing. I have 20 items I have been saving up but I just haven't had time to get to them.




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Flying to the Midwest Today

November 17, 2006 7:00 AM | 0 Comments

Here I am in the Westchester airport in New York waiting for my flight. No coffee yet this morning so I wonder if my grammar will be OK. This airport is the best as parking to check in is about 2 minutes. The downside is a lack of flights if you need to change yours or if there is a cancellation. It is a very small airport and very close to my house which is great.


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Google Click-to-Call

November 16, 2006 10:38 PM | 0 Comments
After many months of testing Google has finally added click to call functionality to Google Maps.
 
Although this really isn't a new announcement the addition to Google Maps is pretty exciting as it continues VoIP's growth into new areas and business models. Certainly click to call has been around longer than Google has but the search leader by virtue of its dominance in the search market is able to do click to call on a scale on a larger scale than anyone else.
 
The way the service works is simple; you type in what you are looking for and the city and state. You could put in Pizza in Fairfield, CT and you could click on Frank Pepe Pizza for example. From there you enter your phone number in a box and you are connected automatically via VoIP. The quality of the call is outstanding if my few tests are any indication. But then again your own bandwidth isn't being used (unless your phone also uses VoIP) as Google uses their network to connect the call and ring your phone.
 
The power behind this network is VoIP Inc and the company has been working with Google Talk for many months so this new relationship shouldn’t be so surprising.
 
Now the question worth asking is how this service will be monetized. For now the company seems to be happy to get customers more comfortable using Google services for virtually everything they do. I suppose the next step could be playing a brief ad to callers before the call is connected.
 
The company seems to be on its way to acting as a middleman between many callers. The question is how to leverage this into a business model. Perhaps the business model in this case will be what it always seems to be at Google -- another way to drive more people to the site to click on ads. In fact with revenue reaching an all time high and the stock price about to break through $500 per share, increasing ad revenue seems like a great strategy.
 
So we now see VoIP as a tool used by the mighty search engine giant Google to boost search engine revenue. This is truly a great new service Google offers and what's not to like? I've speculated before about all the wonderful things Google could do as your phone provider. So far they have given people a free and easy way to speak with US based businesses. Perhaps these are baby steps but in this case the baby is worth billions and the steps are being monitored closely by everyone who competes with Google in search and those who compete as phone companies.
 
 

Canada Deregulates VoIP

November 16, 2006 6:25 PM | 0 Comments
So I am not breaking this news at all but is important enough for me to cover. I heard about this news at around 7:30 am this morning and have been meaning to write it up all day. Patrick Barnard who is part of TMCnet’s editorial team clued me into what was happening here. Canada is deregulating VoIP and the Canadian federal government has overruled the CRTC which is the Canadian equivalent of the FCC.
 
According to Minister Bernier, “It will mean lower costs, fewer regulatory proceedings, and more competitive markets. Barriers to entry in this market are very low. There is no reason to regulate it.”
 
Thanks to Greg Galitzine for covering this news and of course for Russell Shaw who broke the news on TMCnet anyway. For some time I have been meaning to write about Russell’s new blog on TMCnet called RSS - Regulations, Statutes and Standards. The telecom market is rife with regulations that change markets. The FCC mandating 911 for VoIP service providers overnight with an impossible deadline affected VoIP. It certainly made for an unfriendly investment environment. Net neutrality, the old Ma Bell coming back, etc are all things changing the entire telecom sector.
 
Certainly we see the telecom market is ever-changing and regulations, statutes and standards are something we need to keep an eye on.
 
So what does Russell write about? I am certainly glad you asked? Here is a list of recent entries:
 

The Conclusion of the Zultys Saga – For Now

November 16, 2006 5:19 PM | 1 Comment
Here is part of my Internet Telephony Magazine Publisher's Outlook December 2006. It is is in addition to Cisco Systems Rockets Ahead, Beats all Estimates" href="http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/rich-tehrani/ip-communications/cisco-systems-rockets-ahead-beats-all-estimates.html">Cisco Systems Rockets Ahead, Beats all Estimates which was posted earlier today: 
 
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A few months back, TMC’s Greg Galitzine broke the story on his blog that Zultys had ceased day-to-day operations. From there I wrote about the company closing down on my blog and later updated the story when Zultys founder Iain Milnes told me the shut down was temporary. A few days later Iain told me and I reported that Zultys was back up and running.
 
It turns out that if the company was indeed back up and running this was only the case for a short while and a bankruptcy filing took place shortly thereafter with a bankruptcy auction in the works for the future. While this situation took place TMCnet and I reported on the happenings. Out of the blue I received a phone call from a Zultys reseller who told me how big his sales pipeline was and moreover how big the pipeline of other resellers was. He had nothing but amazingly positive comments to share.
 
I shared the comments of this reseller who requested anonymity under a blog entry titled Zultys Reseller Update. It was at this point the fireworks began. Dozens of commenters were either supportive of Zultys or berated Zultys and even me for having the nerve to write what a reseller told me. Well the reseller was insulted so many times in the blog comments he decided to divulge his identity and from there more people joined in on the dialogue. I received many calls and e-mails about this single entry and it blew me away that a single blog entry became the general source for the Zultys community to get its moment by moment information on the happenings of the bankruptcy proceedings.
 
The comments on the blog started to wind down once the announcement was made that Pivot a company supported by Telrad Connegy, an Israeli-based PBX manufacturer with a 50-year involvement in the global telecom arena had purchased the Zultys assets and hired many of their engineers.
 
About a week or so after the auction I received an e-mail from Iain Milnes who told me he wanted to talk about the real facts regarding the ordeal and he went on to say a tremendous amount of misinformation had been spread. He wasn’t able to discuss any of this until we spoke recently.
 
I had an hour-long conversation with Milnes for over an hour and what emerged is quite interesting. He started off by saying he believes the new management is acting very stupidly as they are closing down sales offices throughout the world. Many Zultys resellers around the world have complained to Zultys that they have not been contacted. Iain went onto explain there are eight times more people in China and India than there is in the US. He spent years building up sales and partnerships in these areas and now the new Zultys/Pivot management has destroyed it all in four days.
 
Milnes went on to say that 60% of the company’s business was international and there were offices in Bangalore, China and throughout the world. As Iain went onto say at Zultys they were shooting for the stars and the goal was to make the company an international force in a short amount of time. Many Zultys customers were international as well so they required their communications partner to be the same.
 
Iain mentioned the international customers will not be happy with service and support going forward but they love the product.
 
Iain and I discussed the fact that an argument can be made the company is where it is because of a failed strategy that needs to be changed. To this he replied the new management seems to think you should grow domestically and then expand overseas. He sees this as a flawed strategy as you aren’t able to sell multinationals in this manner and now the channels are already built. Office in UK and Australia are deserted and China is winding down and relinquishing their lease.
 
Iain reiterated the point that even if you think international expansion was a flawed investment, Now it has been made. “Homologation in China took 2 years,” he said emphatically. It has been made and done and now the office had big orders from major institutions and was profitable. As he said, “Even if you say Milnes did a bad job with international expansion, not retaining it is a more stupid mistake.” In his opinion the company doesn’t understand why the company has failed. He believes if you are in the PBX space and aren’t in China and other parts of the world today you can never break into these markets.
 
So why did the company fail? As Iain tells it, Zultys started with a strategy of making the company hundreds of millions of dollars. He says he didn’t think they could put Cisco or Avaya out but they thought they could be in the top 3 or 5. He mentioned Zultys was number 3 this summer in PBX sales.
 
After investing $67 million dollars of his own money into the company Iain decided to seek a round of funding in the fourth quarter of last year. In the first quarter and second of this year they had more orders than they could deliver. He needed money to put into building product to fulfill expansion. They spoke to 5 investment bankers. Citigroup courted them and got the business as they thought there were good fundamentals, distribution, and the press and analysts were talking highly about the company.
 
Everyone figured it would take only a few months to get the dollars they needed to keep going and to continue their expansion. Citigroup wanted to be part of the IPO which everyone believed would be a few years away. The investment bank spoke to 97 investors on their behalf and at the end they had one investor. Verbal terms were then agreed upon a few days later when they expected a term sheet they instead received a rejection.
 
According to Milnes, “There was no plan B and that was the problem.” They never thought they would fail. They seemed to sincerely believe they would get the money and that others would see the value in what they created and did.
 
In addition the company had spent money manufacturing overseas but the products never ramped up enough to make it an intelligent investment. In other words for the amount of product sold it would have been cheaper to make them in the US. Iain seems to have toyed with the idea of laying off the engineering team to save money in order to get them through the tough times but this didn’t seem like a wise idea while the company was seeking investors.
 
  • Iain went on to recount the reasons for failure. The list reads as follows and seemed more like a confession than an interview.
  • They should have been selling more
  • They should have worked out why they were having the problems they were
  • He understands it now
  • He was the head of the company and it was a team effort
  • They didn’t market as well as they could have
  • They didn’t engineer fast enough
  • They made lots of mistakes
  • The guy on top – him – did not really how to take this through with a plan b
  • They should have planned more carefully
 
Iain believes if the company had $10 million and working capital Zultys could have been a great company. He will go to his grave wondering why no one wanted to invest in Zultys he says and he thinks perhaps PBXs have been around 100 years and are not sexy.
 
Milnes went on to talk about all the international success Zultys experienced and how resellers are now sad they have to go to more complicated systems from the competition.
 
He doesn’t think the software engineers have a clue how to run accompany. He did point out he started out [on his own] 20 years ago and wouldn’t deny the opportunity to anyone. The challenge as he sees it is picking up a living breathing organism. “They are out of their depths,” he said. He went on to say “They Have no clue how to run a company or what is required to sell, service and support a product.” In addition he feels a few of them have stabbed him in the back. He mentioned that some people currently at Zultys feel the same way and many of these people are looking for other jobs while collecting a paycheck at the company.
 
Iain went on to say he is sorry to the suppliers, resellers, customers and employees. He is very sorry for causing so much havoc. He knows he affected lives of employees. He made a mistake and he thinks he knows what he did wrong and what he would do right in the future
 
I asked Iain what is next for him and he said he will be forming a new company. He doesn’t know what it is going to do but Milnes said, “I think I know a bit about communications and running accompany.” He said Lots of people have come to him and want to work for him. He is still looking for ideas so if you have any Iain asked you let me know and I will forward them to him.
 
I have known Iain for about a decade. The last company he worked at was called Zarak and it used to make testing products. One of these product lines was called abacus. The company was purchased a number of years back by Spirent and I mentioned to him that Spirent is still selling the Abacus product. At this point he told me that China sales in mushroomed after Spirent purchased Zarak.
 
He recently went to dinner with a former salesperson for Spirent who told him in China they love the Abacus product. He was hoping to achieve this with Zultys products. Zultys was into some pretty big accounts. He thinks they could have been very dominant in another 5 years
 
Iain said, “The loss of international emphasis is the gain of other companies who can capitalize on it.” He went on to say he was working so hard and putting in the money. He said he should have stood back and looked at he market. He believes he should have hired a good CFO one year ago and this wouldn’t have helped. He mentioned he wasn’t looking at the numbers
 
Iain summed it up by sawing he saw the success but did not see the need for cash until it was too late. They wanted to believe they would be successful in raising it. He did not keep the eye on long term cash flow. That was the fundamental problem in his opinion. Iain went on to say they could have sold more, had better engineers, marketers and sales people. He reiterated it was team effort. He asked, “Why was Zarak so successful?” He said they had excellence in everything they did. He felt they needed more excellence in Zultys. He summarized by saying he blew it and he is terribly sorry – to everyone.
 
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Don’t Forget About ITEXPO January in Florida
I love Florida in January and experience has shown the world’s buyers of VoIP and IP communications come to ITEXPO East in Ft. Lauderdale. The brochure is now available for this show and the conferences will be better than ever before. Don’t forget about the collocated IMS and Call Center 2.0 events. Check it out at www.itexpo.com and join us January 23-26 in 2007.

Cisco Systems Rockets Ahead, Beats all Estimates

November 16, 2006 5:07 PM | 0 Comments
Here is part of my Internet Telephony Magazine Publisher's Outlook December 2006:
 
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Certainly the biggest news in recent months is that Cisco Systems, the world’s biggest vendor of computer-networking equipment, reported first-quarter 2007 net sales of $8.2 billion (exceeding analyst predictions, which ranged from $7.9 billion to about $8.05 billion) and net income of $1.61 billion (up 28% from last year). In a public statement, Cisco’s CEO John Chambers boasted that the company “achieved, once again, record revenue of approximately $8.2 billion, a 25 percent year-over-year increase and a Cisco standalone increase of approximately 16 percent, which was above our standalone guidance of 11 to 13 percent,” adding, “This is the fastest standalone year-over-year revenue growth rate we have seen in several years.”
 
After the news appeared, investors jumped into the market, sending Cisco shares surging 7% to a new 52-week high of $27.44. The stock closed that day with a 6% gain, at $26.71 on the Nasdaq. Analysts everywhere either immediately upgraded their rating on the stock to “buy” or else increased their price targets.
 
The Associated Press quoted Ittai Kidron, an analyst with CIBC: “Few businesses Cisco’s size can claim to have achieved what it did in [the quarter] — outperformance in nearly every product line. . . From routers and switches to Digital set-tops and Storage Networks, the company had a breakout quarter, with strong order trends and market share gains. . .”
 
There are actually several reasons for Cisco’s good fortune, the most superficial of which was a strong rally of technology stocks. One should take more notice of, for example, Cisco’s astute $6.9 billion acquisition of set-top box manufacturer Scientific-Atlanta in February 2006, which added $584 million to net sales during the quarter. (Scientific Atlanta orders also increased 20% during this time.)
 
But even more important was Banc of America Securities Analyst Tim Long noting that Cisco had boosted the number of its sales personnel, and the company had done particularly well in Europe and Japan, all while maintaining healthy sales in the USA.
 
Much of Cisco’s spectacular success, then, can be attributed to good old-fashioned increased sales of equipment, thanks to Cisco becoming diversified geographically just as the world is experiencing accelerated broadband and VoIP adoption.
 
For example, as of June 2006, Analysis Research estimated that the number of broadband connections in Europe rose by 4.4 million in the second quarter of 2006 to reach 74.8 million. The proportion of European broadband connections using DSL held steady at 79.9%, while cable lost a bit of share, from 16.6% to 16.4%. Germany remains the largest broadband market in Europe, with 12.5 million connections (16.8% of Europe’s broadband connections), followed by the UK and France.
 
An increase in the number of broadband connections means that more Cisco routers and other infrastructure devices are sold, which is reflected in Cisco’s increased revenues. Cisco’s U.S. equipment orders grew in the upper-teens and European orders grew in the low double-digits. Carrier orders increased 23%, and even enterprise purchases of Cisco equipment reached into the mid-teens.
 
Two specific areas of hyper-growth for Cisco were wireless which grew at 40% year-over-year and Unified Communications at 30%.
 
But broadband growth in Europe, as impressive as it sounds, is just part of the story. Broadband in Asia, particularly China, is growing at a phenomenal rate — adoption rate increases have reached 90% or more annually in China alone. According to the DSL Forum, there are over 140 million consumer broadband connections worldwide, around 37% of which are in EMEA.
 
The world is stampeding toward broadband, and if Cisco can continue to boost its presence in global markets and achieve the same kind of inroads worldwide as it has in Europe, Japan and the U.S., its revenues will be even more impressive. To reach smaller and more varied carrier markets, Cisco launched during the quarter a new, small form factor version (4-slots, single-shelf) of their Cisco CRS-1 Carrier Routing System, 8 and 16-slot versions of which are normally found in the Internet’s largest core installations.
 
As it is, however, I’m sure they feel good about having 50% share of the router market and about 70% of the overall Ethernet switching market. Just as AT&T/Lucent and Nortel were the “duopoly” of the North American PBX market, the world of big core routing/switching devices also has a duopoly, Cisco and Juniper Networks, which have a combined market share of over 95%. It helps to explain how Cisco can be holding onto a hefty $16 billion in cash and no long-term debt, not to mention its ability to generate a cash flow averaging more than $600 million per month.
 
Aside from selling infrastructure equipment to support more broadband ports, Cisco is deriving increased revenues from VoIP. After all, once people become broadband subscribers, they ask their friends what else they can do with it other than surf the web quickly. IP Communications is generally the first “other thing” they hear about.
 
As VoIP usage increases, so does Cisco’s revenues from its Linksys home router/gateway division, which started shipping VoIP products in April 2005 and has seen the fastest growth of any Cisco/Linksys product line. These products include the Linksys Phone Adapter for existing routers, the Wireless-G Router with two phone ports (that was named Best VoIP Product in the Wireless Broadband Innovation Awards), and the Wired Broadband Router with two phone ports. Once you plug in your phone to one of these devices, you can then subscribe to Vonage, AT&T CallVantage, Verizon VoiceWing, or EarthLink TrueVoice, depending on which device is supported by the provider.
 
Linksys and Yahoo! have teamed up to sell a cordless phone — the Linksys Dual-Mode Cordless Phone for Yahoo Messenger with Voice (CIT310) — that’s specifically designed to make free PC-to-PC calls using Yahoo’s Internet voice service. You can also use your Yahoo Phone Out accounts and Yahoo Phone In accounts to make and receive calls. The phone’s base station plugs into a conventional phone jack to access ordinary PSTN phone service, and by pressing a button on the phone users can toggle between regular PSTN service and Yahoo Messenger with Voice service. The Linksys CIT310 has a range of 985 feet outdoors and about 165 feet indoors. Standby time is 100 hours and talk time is 10 hours.
 
However, word-of-mouth inevitably leads many broadband users to the world’s single most popular free VoIP application, Skype. As of November 2006 there were 113 million registered Skype users across the globe and over eight million simultaneous Skype calls at any given time. Fortunately, Linksys also offers a phone similar to the CIT310 for Skype users, the Linksys CIT200 Skype.
 
So, just as Cisco’s infrastructure equipment sales are tied to a global increase in broadband and VoIP adoption, so too is the success of Cisco’s Linksys division.
 
Of course, Cisco is involved in other related areas. During the quarter they acquired Arroyo Video Solutions and Meetinghouse Data Communications. They introduced their TelePresence conferencing solution and launched the Cisco Digital Media System and Cisco Wide Area Application Services.
 
With increased purchases of Cisco gear from enterprises and service providers as they move into bandwidth-hungry IMS and multimedia-centric environments, Cisco Systems could very well continue its phenomenal growth for a surprisingly long time. Much of this growth of course is thanks to VoIP/IP communications.
 
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Cisco Also Does Well in the

 

Apparently massive call center growth in the Philippines call center industry has led Cisco to grow 100% in call center products and a full 333% in the IT storage space.

Altigen Buyout Offer

November 16, 2006 10:07 AM | 0 Comments
Reuters reports today that Ten Pine Advisors LLC raised its bid for Altigen to $2.03 per share or $30.5 million.
 
Disclosure: I own shares in Altigen

Cisco Booted at UPMC

November 15, 2006 3:20 PM | 0 Comments
To be more fair, at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Cisco, Avaya Nortel and Siemens voice systems will all be replaced by Alcatel in a $300 million deal that seems more like a service provider network than one needed for your typical medical needs. The deal is France-based Alcatel's largest enterprise transaction in North America, and will involve the retirement of thousands of Cisco switches and routers, hundreds of PBX systems, and thousands of digital phones from Avaya, Nortel, Siemens and other vendors. In doing this, the medical center will consolidate more than 150 standalone PBX phone systems into two redundant data centers, while boosting its core bandwidth by a factor of 10.

"It's pretty big," says Bill Hanna, vice president of IT infrastructure at UPMC. "The long and short of it is that the Cisco infrastructure will be replaced with an Alcatel infrastructure."

Analysts quoted in this article think this could be a defining moment for Alcatel who can now become a serious player in the enterprise space. Ironically, recent announcements at Alcatel have been focusing on their service provider business and now this massive deal comes along. The company could indeed become a major threat to Cisco in the future as they have a breadth of product in the service provider space unmatched by Cisco and in the enterprise they have great products that to date just didn’t gain much traction in the US. Perhaps things will be different with their Lucent purchase. They now have significant real estate in the US. Can they use this to gain more share is the important question however.
 
One successful deployment no matter how large does not a trend make. Still this is a very big deal that should be considered a major shot at Cisco’s lead in the space.

Cantata Layoffs

November 15, 2006 12:20 PM | 0 Comments
The word on the street is that approximately 50 people (see update) were laid off at Cantata yesterday out of a workforce of 300. Most of the people who were let go are shocked. Sources tell me the reason for the layoffs are soft sales numbers and some speculate the company is facing increased competition in its Excel Switching line. Apparently competitors are providing lower cost solutions. In addition others believe the company has not fully promoted the new Cantata brand which has much less awareness than the decade and a half old Brooktrout name and the very well-known Excel name.
 
This news comes at a time when speculation exists that Dialogic will take share back from many in the media processing space.
 
Update
 
According to Peter Vescuso the VP of Marketing at Cantata Technology:
 
There is a longer term plan in place at the company to offshore development. Many of the people who will be let go will stay on with the company for some time. Cantata is looking to increase its competitiveness by hiring people in other areas of the world. In some cases where costs are lower and in other cases where it makes sense strategically to hire people. In other words closer to the customers.
 
This means the number 50 I quoted above is not entirely accurate as many of these jobs will be replaced. The company would not give an exact number of people let go.
 
I was present when Greg Galitzine asked Peter what the effect of these moves will be on customers. Peter said this is good news for partners and customers as the company will have better products longer term and they will be able to serve them much better as well.
 
In response the Dialogic mention above Peter said the opposite is true as Cantata has benefited from the Eicon/Dialogic integration and have gained some customers they were unlikely to get if the company was still under Intel’s umbrella. They plan on making an announcement about this news soon.

529 College Savings

November 15, 2006 10:40 AM | 1 Comment
Sorry – this has nothing to do with tech or VoIP or IP communications or really anything TMCnet normally covers. Still I am compelled to share good news about 529 plans I just learned that on August 17, 2006, President Bush signed the Pension Protection Act of 2006. Among other provisions that address retirement planning, this legislation ensured that qualified withdrawals from 529 accounts would be permanently tax free. Prior to the bill becoming law, this benefit was scheduled to expire after 2010.
 
There are more details about 529 plans in this article from Upromise. In case you aren’t aware, Upromise has various ways for people to save money for tuition via deals they have worked out with product manufacturers and retailers. Basically you can get a percentage of your purchases put into an account that accrues for use in paying tuition.

Air Blown Fiber Market to Grow

November 15, 2006 9:55 AM | 0 Comments
They say death and taxes are the only two certainties in life but I wonder if in the technology space we could come up with a couple of certainties as well. I would say the need for "bandwidth" and the pace of "change" are the two certainties we must contend with in tech. As bandwidth hungry IP communications becomes more prevalent companies need to focus on network capacity to ensure they can easily carry voice and video with excess capacity left over for other important network functions. Not every company is carrying voice and video on their networks today but it seems the trend is certainly going in that direction.
 
The challenge for IT departments of course is knowing what the applications of importance will be six months from now and perhaps as importantly six years from now. One answer to the dilemma is to buy the most expensive bandwidth solution you can find – or the most expensive fiber in the hope that the technology will have you covered for years to come. Of course with the continuous change in fiber technology taking place, who knows if today's fiber deployment will be obsolete in a few years.
 
I had a chance to speak with Sumitomo Electric about a solution to the problem which is their FutureFLEX Air-blown Fiber Technology. The solution uses tubes and instead of laying dark fiber. This is a great solution as it does not require you to purchase the fiber before you need it. This allows you the ability to avoid purchasing obsolete technology and overspending. In addition you don’t need building permits or construction to lay new fiber. The solution uses empty tubes that are ready at any time to be filled with fiber, instead of laying dark fiber.
 
When you want to add more fiber you can blow out the old fiber and blow in new fiber at 150 feet per minute. This is done via distribution boxes which are located throughout a building. This allows you to preserve your fiber investment.
 
The company’s current customers include many household names such as CNN, ESPN, Mayo Clinic, DFW International Airport, Pentagon, Nissan, Johns Hopkins University, Homeland Security and Intel so it is surprising the air blown fiber market hasn’t received more publicity.
 
Recently I found out that University of Phoenix Stadium (Home of the Arizona Cardinals) became the First NFL facility to deploy Sumitomo’s FutureFLEX solution. The 1.7 million square foot facility includes wireless network access from every seat for fans, seamless voice, data and video for facilitating Cardinal team-member communications, and quick-response FutureFLEX-enabled network reconfigurations for the stadium’s concession vendors, event customers, and numerous broadcasters that demand quick network changes to meet their continuously changing requirements.
 
Mark Feller, technology director for the Cardinals said in an announcement, “The FutureFLEX infrastructure makes it possible for us to bring on new capacity in hours or days, rather than weeks or months. It resolves many IT issues by providing immediate scalability and quick and easy fiber installations (without construction crews disrupting operations or the facility) for a bandwidth-ready network backbone.” He continued, “The FutureFLEX system also eases the planning and budget process for not only expected network growth, but enables us also to meet quickly any unexpected network expansions, moves, adds, and changes required to accommodate future technology and new projects or events, such as the hosting of the Fiesta Bowl and 2008 Super Bowl XLII. Based upon these benefits, FutureFLEX is changing the way IT views the physical layer.”
 
Ballparks are looking to become more technologically advanced these days and Cisco is an integral part of the solution in Arizona. In addition, Cisco recently made it known they are working to build the most advanced stadium in the world for the Oakland A's in Fremont, California. Cisco insiders tell me the company had excess real estate acquired during the bubble times and they felt their future expansion could be handled with real estate they have on hand. Subsequently Cisco seems to be potentially donating some or all of the land in exchange for marketing and other stadium rights.
 
But getting back to certainties in tech, "bandwidth " and "change" are what many IT managers have to contend with on a daily basis. With that in mind, Sumitomo Electric wants to be the equivalent of your doctor and accountant, enabling the rapid evolution of the physical layer of your network regardless of what your bandwidth needs will be or how technology changes.

Caritas/Comcast VoIP Patent Victory

November 14, 2006 10:26 AM | 0 Comments
The VoIP market won a victory in Texas yesterday with Comcast defending itself successfully against a $2.2 billion lawsuit brought on by Caritas Technologies. The company was formed by four men, including David Farber, who many consider the grandfather Internet, was awarded a series of VoIP-related patents. One, in particular, Caritas claimed could be read to include calls that were made partly using VoIP connections and partly across the PSTN. Essentially, Caritas was claiming to have invented to capability to connect calls running partially on the PSTN and partially on IP networks, explained Daralyn Durie, attorney at Keker & Van Nest, LLP, representing Comcast in the case.
 
In the suit, whereby Caritas sought to end the Comcast Digital Voice (CDV) VoIP service offering, Caritas alleged that CDV infringed on Caritas’ patent rights, and in a claim construction hearing on July 31, the main issue was the term, “telephone connection in a telephone network.” Comcast held that the patent owned by Caritas was intended as a way to set up conference calls on the PSTN, not a way to have actual voice signals transmitted over an IP network. Caritas, conversely, argued that their patent could be interpreted to cover these hybrid PSTN/VoIP calls.

The court subsequently issued a ruling in accordance with Comcast’s stance, asserting that the term, “telephone connection in a telephone network,” means a circuit-switched connection between telephones.
 
So we are entering a phase of the VoIP market where the technology has become successful enough to warrant more and more companies looking for a piece of the action. There are all sorts of angles to play here from patents to partnering. Remember the recent controversy about RTI suing Google over VoIP patents. The VoIP market although a fraction of the PSTN in terms of revenue is growing rapidly and there seems no doubt that all calls will eventually run over IP.

The 50 Most Influential People in VoIP

November 13, 2006 6:51 PM | 1 Comment
I was very excited to learn today that I was honored to be part of The 50 Most Influential People in VoIP. The list starts with the Asterisk community followed by the FCC, Congress and Cisco. Further down the list are the bloggers. Starting at #26 with Jeff Pulver, Andy Abramson, Om Malik and yours truly at 29. Good news for Greg Galitzine who ranks at 35. TMC’s newest blogger Russell Shaw (news on what he is covering will break tomorrow) weighs in at 36. Tom Keating, TMC’s oldest blogger also made the list at 37.
 
The most interesting number on the list is 17 which reads: Bryan Martin, Packet8 – Went public before Vonage. May be around after them.
 
TMCnet was also honored under the heading The Anchormen – VoIP News Teams. The site was ranked #2 under this particular list – making it #43 -- behind VoIP News and just ahead of Network World who rounded out the list at #44.
 
I think this is a good list but I am not sure how 3Com made it at all let alone #8. The last five years for this company have been a downward spiral in virtually everything they do. This company still has a great name and this is amazing considering how much their leadership and message has changed over the past half decade. Words like pathetic are what ex-employees use to describe senior company management. Still their early NBX work in the late nineties was almost a decade ahead of most of the competition. But if they are doing lot of VoIP research today they are certainly keeping it a great secret from many.
 
Here is what I wrote about the company in Internet Telephony Magazine in May 2001.
Can Someone Throw This Company A Map?
By the way, what exactly is 3Com doing with their company? Here was a runaway leader in the corporate networking market, one who happened to make the hottest handhelds in the business, to boot! With the inevitable convergence of more and more disparate products and the future of computing pointing to handheld devices, why would you give away your crown jewel and spin off Palm as a separate company? As I mentioned, the Palm platform provides a great deal of leverage. The question becomes even more important in light of the fact that 3Com discontinued their enterprise networking product line last year upsetting a tremendous amount of their installed base. 3Com is the only company I know that is discontinuing their product lines faster than it is launching new products. This company seems to have lost its way.
 
By the way I was berated by the PR department of the company for writing this. Less than a year later the PR people doing the berating left the company. Enough said.
 
One other comment is I think Alec, Jon, Skype Journal, Mark Evans, Garrett Smith, Greg Galitzine, Russell Shaw, Tom Keating and VoIPNow belong ahead of me on the list. I also think Voxilla would have been a good addition.
 
So thank you VoIP-News. You guys are awesome and I appreciate the recognition for not only myself but my fellow blogging community members who toil endlessly – many of us for the lure of getting rich quick via Google’s advertising network. :-)

Google: Free Cell Phones

November 13, 2006 1:03 PM | 2 Comments
Eric Schmidt says cell phones should be free. Google has no plans to give away cell phones but is obvious the company is perfectly positioned to show their ads on the small screens of cell phones. Just as newspapers and magazines have lower subscription costs due to advertising support, Schmidt sees the same thing happening to mobile phones. Google has recently spent considerable time and effort on designing applications for mobile devices and it is logical that "gadgets" will be a strategic area for the company in the coming years.

Showing Kevin Martin the Door

November 13, 2006 11:34 AM | 0 Comments
David Isenberg weighs in on FCC Chairman Kevin martin and why he should be shown the exit. Here is an excerpt:

Martin's appointment to a second term as FCC Commissioner is pending Senate confirmation. I like Kevin; he's personable, he's articulate, he understands the issues in deep detail. But he shouldn't be confirmed.

Martin has not championed the Internet or its future; he seems intent on strengthening the old telco business model. Under his leader chairmanship, U.S. Internet connectivity has fallen ever further behind the rest of the world. U.S. citizens pay more for less Internet connectivity than most developed nations.
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