As service providers continue to look for new sources of revenue the role of the application server becomes clear… Provide applications with no down time while allowing seamless scalability. A recent TMC white paper addition is Solid Information Technologies entry titled: Building Next Generation Network Services - The Data Management Infrastructure. This document is a good read for those looking to deploy blade servers in an environment where applications can scale seamlessly across the blades. It is an interesting look at how to build redundant and scaleable next-gen services. If you would like to learn more, just read this article or white paper.December 2006 Archives
As service providers continue to look for new sources of revenue the role of the application server becomes clear… Provide applications with no down time while allowing seamless scalability. A recent TMC white paper addition is Solid Information Technologies entry titled: Building Next Generation Network Services - The Data Management Infrastructure. This document is a good read for those looking to deploy blade servers in an environment where applications can scale seamlessly across the blades. It is an interesting look at how to build redundant and scaleable next-gen services. If you would like to learn more, just read this article or white paper.Brix Networks has recently received patent number 7,058,020 covering a technique for time stamping data packets in order to measure network characteristics. This technique can be used to measure latency and jitter. VoIP and video quality will be a growing area of the IP communications market and Brix is one of a number of companies looking to associate themselves with this space. They call the market the converged service assurance solutions space but you can think of them as working to better the QoS of media on IP networks.
OK so I am using a blog as a sounding board to complain. I do this often. Perhaps this is part of my unique charm?
Since the holiday season is approaching I will complain without telling you what company I am complaining about. This is my gift to them. I will tell you however that they are a top computer maker in the US and their name doesn’t rhyme with smell.
Since the holiday season is approaching I will complain without telling you what company I am complaining about. This is my gift to them. I will tell you however that they are a top computer maker in the US and their name doesn’t rhyme with smell.The story goes; I needed to buy a computer for a family member and ordered it on a Saturday. The family member told me instead it should be a laptop. So on the following Sunday I called to cancel it. The customer service representative in India had me hold to be connected to someone else who was definitely in the US. This person then asked me to hold for a supervisor. Approximately 60+ minutes later I was told there was a technical problem and the order cannot be cancelled.
The company suggested I wait for the computer to arrive and then send it back.
I think this may one of the stupidest companies I have ever worked with. Within 24 hours it should be trivial to cancel an order. Perhaps I don’t understand just in time manufacturing but I thought on a Sunday it should be easy to cancel an order. I would imagine it is easier to stop an order then wait for it to ship, and then ship it back.
But then again hey, what do I know.
So we waited patiently for the items to arrive and they didn’t show up on the day they should have. Instead, I received an e-mail telling me there are manufacturing delays and subsequently the computer will not arrive on time.
In the e-mail I was given the option of cancelling the order and in addition I was told I will receive a $50 credit on my next computer purchase. The credit did indeed arrive in another e-mail.
So I cancelled the computer order and now have a $50 credit. In the end this is probably less than the company would have paid to ship the computer anyway (there was free shipping included with the purchase).
As a customer, I am not sure what to make of this. Is this business as usual in corporate America or just plain lunacy? But hey, I shouldn’t complain and I am indeed happier to have the $50 credit and not have to deal with the return. The question is, shouldn’t companies have a system in place to allow customers to cancel orders in a more efficient manner?
But on the bright side the $50 credit has won me over. Sure the company is out of packet but they purchased some customer loyalty and I am leaning towards ordering the laptop from the same company. I wonder still if it wouldn’t have been more effective to let me get the order cancelled quickly in the first place. The company would have had a laptop order sooner, a happy customer and saved $50 which is probably the entire margin on a computer purchase these days.
Heading back from Mass we were looking for a lunch place that was better than fast food you might find off the highway. The decision of course was Kathy John's restaurant in Storrs, CT located a stone's throw from the University of Connecticut (UCONN) my alma mater. Unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to stop by and see how the university has improved. The last time I saw it was five years ago or so and the campus was much nicer than when I was a student. I hear it continues to improve.
Back to the restaurant, the hodgepodge soup is still as good as always. The desserts looked fantastic but I resisted temptation. Back in the late eighties the ice cream at the restaurant came from the UCONN dairy and couldn’t be better. Kathy Johns is on the corner of route 44 and 195. It is still highly recommended.
I would like to take a moment and thank all my readers and wish you all a great holiday season and a Happy New Year. In addition I want to specifically thank you all for visiting TMCnet so frequently as we have once again hit one million unique visitors in the month on November according to WebTrends. This is the second time this year we have done so. (Apparently our October numbers are still being run -- long story. We may have hit this number in that month as well.)
Thank you for making TMCnet the largest community of communications and technology decision makers in the world.
A few things you should know about TMCnet going forward are the site will soon have a more streamlined look that is easier on the eyes. We realize the site is busy but then again there is so much information to share it is difficult to present it all without appearing a bit dare I say cluttered.
Expect TMCnet to become much more flexible and customizable going forward allowing you to continue to count on the site as your primary resource for communications and technology news, views, opinion and analysis.
Thank you once again and Happy Holidays to all!
One comment I made in article a few months back has turned into a fun conversation in the industry. I called Jon Shapiro “Larger than Life.” Apparently this led to much ribbing of Jon and someone even designed a photo of Jon as larger than life. I have yet to see it but I promise to publish it if I get a hold of it.
So who is Jon? If you aren’t aware, he is the founder of Alliance Systems and throughout the explosion of PC-based telephony systems his company has been a dominant supplier of boards and industrial computer systems. In the nineties before VoIP existed the exciting area in telecom was CTI or computer telephony integration where the telecom and computing worlds came together. APIs such as TAPI and TSAPI from the major OS vendors allowed the telecom industry -- for the first time to take advantage of commoditized PC hardware and open development environments. DSP resource board vendors such as Dialogic, NMS, Rhetorex, Brooktrout and Aculab supplied the building block components allowing you to build an inexpensive IVR platform or ACD or whatever else you felt like assembling.
As the VoIP gateway market began to grow in the late nineties, the early models were comprised of industrial computers with DSP resource boards and software. When I took tours of industrial computer plants at the time many of them were churning out gateways for companies like Lucent and other big name equipment manufactures.
Alliance Systems has remained a big player in telecom and Jon tells me his company had 15-18% market share of all ATCA systems sold this year. He is beginning to see equipment manufacturers and service providers buying more than they have in a long while and an increasing percentage of sales are coming from this category. The percentage could be as high as 40% or higher going forward.
They have a new series of product coming out soon which will save 40% on electricity and allow 4X current density levels. He has a customer who is in a data center currently where they aren't able to get any more electricity for a year. They are maxed out. These new servers will help this customer increase their server capacity by 40%.
The company also has a government customer who has a simulation trailer with 350 computers in it. This customer can now see a power drop and at the same time have room for an additional simulation chamber onboard.
In addition Alliance computers will work on DC power -- a major trend in data centers. This allows more power savings as well as less heat dissipation. John says current power supplies are rated to last 100,000 hours but now with DC you can get 7 million hours out of a chassis. Part of the reason for this massive increase is the removal of fans in some systems which are a moving part that fails relatively often compared to solid state electronics.
In systems that require fans you can have a fan that blows air out from the top of the chassis allowing a data center to blow the hot air out directly into the HVAC system for warming of the building if needed. With these new servers the data center doesn’t need a cold aisle meaning increased density, lower cooling costs and more flexibility in data center design.
Jon always tells it like it is and I have never heard him so optimistic. He sees the telecom business and his business as well exploding with growth. There are numerous reasons for this. For example the need for corporations to record more and more of what happens means the need for computers and storage continues to increase exponentially. Phone calls take up lots of disk space.
Moreover, Alliance Systems has been in the communications space for so long they are well known as telecom experts and in addition with their new denser more power efficient computers they have a great value proposition.
Jon also spoke with me about the recent Dialogic Integration -- his company has been a top Dialogic reseller for many years. In his opinion the company has significant challenges but seems to be executing well so far. As he puts it, Nick Jensen the CEO of Dialogic has ambition and it's good to see ambition.
I have been hearing relatives, friends and just about everyone else tell me how Costco is a great place to buy electronics from as their warranty policy is amazing. You can return things apparently forever. I am no sure if this is the case but it seems everyone is buying from Costco and returning things at will.
At a recent lunch with TMC team members a waiter heard us talking about technology and asked us if we could help him. He had just purchased a TV from Best Buy and it broke after a few weeks. The company wouldn’t take the TV back -- they said he damaged it: He denies this is the case -- and the manufacturer told him it would cost more to fix the TV than the TV cost.
Anyway the lunch became a 5 minute sounding board on the virtues of Costco and the poor customer service and return policies of Best Buy. I have never had a problem at Best Buy and perhaps this is because I never returned anything there.
The moral of the story is having the best return policy can turn your customers into huge advocates of your company. I rarely buy electronics from Costco but I am considering doing so now.
Today I am back on the road heading up to New England again. I am not such a fan of cold weather so I usually avoid going north when possible this close to winter. Thankfully it seems like we are having very mild weather with a high in the fifties. Lucky me.
And luck is something the VoIP industry is experiencing as Skype recently decided to stop giving away free PC to phone calling in the US and Canada. Pricing is between $15-$30 a year for the service (depending on when you pay) or a flat rat of 2.1 cents per minute.
This small announcement by a single company is enough to perhaps change an industry. Skype – as positive it is for the PR of communications is a cancer in terms of allowing other service providers to prosper. The company has done an amazing job in virtually every way and keeping Skype Out prices free makes it very difficult for other service providers to make money.
So Skype has decided to lose a bit of market share in exchange for revenue. This is great news for everyone. Skype can afford to lose share and apparently they are interested in making lots of money after all.
Now Vonage and a host of other companies have breathing room. Sure Skype is still cheaper but competing with a service which is 1/6 your price is still easier than competing with free. Vonage’s stock has seen a minor gain this week and perhaps this Skype news is the reason. This single bit of news could change the VoIP landscape for years.
Mass based Nuance Communications seems to have a very bright future with strong sales of desktop, medical and call center speech systems. The company has enviable market share: 90% in desktop dictation, 80% in call centers, and 60% in health care dictation. Seems like a very distributed revenue base. I wonder how the desktop dictation market will do going forward. It seems this market is poised for growth but it seems more a problem of getting users comfortable with speech as the technology is much better than ever.
I just ran into Greg Welch of GlobalTouch Telecom this week when I spoke at the VPF meeting in Los Angeles. He told me he had some news to share – some of which is now here. The company has just deployed a Cantata IMG 1010 including integrated transcoding and SS7 connectivity. GlobalTouch will use the gateway to bridge the PSTN and the IP network.
Is international VoIP growing or shrinking? On the one hand the market is twice the size of last year but on the other the growth rate has slowed for two quarters.
From my perspective there is a tremendous amount of international activity in VoIP now. Specifically there have been registrations at Internet Telephony Conference & Expo from the following countries just this week:
- Peru
- Germany
- Haiti
- Russian Federation
- Brazil
- Sri Lanka
- Pakistan
- Israel
- Hong Kong
- China (Peoples Republic)
- Nicaragua
- Columbia
- Mexico
To date, 46 different nations are represented on the pre-registered attendee list. This is great news for the international VoIP market.
What is AT&T’s take on VoIP? Well nowadays they embrace it wholeheartedly. In fact they see VoIP as an integral part of their success going forward. They want to the be the enterprise VoIP service of choice. Did you know virtually all of AT&T’s employees use MPLS-enabled VoIP today? Neither did I.The company has a white paper on VoIP I thought you would be interested in because as you know making informed decisions requires educating yourself. Part of the white paper is a table explaining how to deploy VoIP depending on your individual requirements such as a greenfield environment or new one.
Educating the market on communications and technology is what TMC does -- this is why we have been building the best whitepaper library in the business. I suggest you read all the white papers that apply to your situation. There are some real gems in here.
If you haven’t been watching, the early-bird deadline for conferences at Internet Telephony Conference & Expo (register) is approaching --tomorrow actually -- and we are talking about a savings of up to $1,000. The show is in 40 days so be sure to make your travel arrangements now as hotel prices will skyrocket soon. For many people there company foots the bill so this isn’t important. To us however, we would rather have you save some of that hard earned cash and spend it with one of the exhibitors at the show. It is just TMC’s way of giving back to the community.
Speaking of giving back, the conference program (PDF) has a ton of amazing new content I hope to cover in future blogs. We are also giving away a Harley Davidson Roadster and Toyota FJ Cruiser. You must be present top win however so be sure to plan your travel accordingly. I wouldn’t want to call your name as a winner and have to keep pulling names because you decided to leave sunny Florida for something like a business meeting. Hey this is the age of IP communications... You should be using telepresence by now.
Why are Verizon shares falling? Well it seems the massive costs of its FIOS initiative has investors wondering if the fiber to the home strategy makes the most sense or is AT&T’s cheaper plan to use copper in the last mile via its U-Verse initiative a better choice?.
A great concluding paragraph from a related article on TheStreet.com is worth sharing:
"People were OK with FiOS until they saw the cable companies were actually doing better, not worse," says one money manager with no Verizon positions. "Winning phone customers is always a lot easier for cable companies than winning TV customers is for phone companies."
My take on all this is AT&T is doing the right thing in the short term and Verizon is doing the right thing in the long run. What am I talking about? Well simply stated copper bandwidth can be increased and increased but to a point. Sooner or later consumers are going to demand gigabytes of bandwidth to play multiple 3-dimensional games and to watch 3-D movies and to take advantage of telepresence. The question is how far can we stretch copper technology? Certainly there are a slew of companies working on this problem but in the end fiber has virtually unlimited bandwidth and copper does not. At least not for now.
So the battle here is over making the right decision for the long haul and I believe Verizon is doing the right thing. Especially in light of the fact that they have to compete with cable companies who have coax. Wall Street may not get all of this and that is probably the reason the stock is getting punished. In addition Wall Street usually won’t focus on a few years down the road – just a few quarters ahead.
Still, making the right long-term choice as a public company may be as difficult as getting through the holiday season at TMC without getting tempted by the delicious daily gift baskets sitting in the kitchen. At least at TMC the problem erodes after Christmas – well really after Easter. Verizon will have to struggle much longer.
Is Google thinking of getting into the banking business? Well according to this Motley Fool article the company has done something novel with its stock options program allowing options granted after the IPO to be traded on the open market once they vest. This protects employees from a stock price meltdown and should in theory lead to happier workers. The program is not for Google executives by the way so we can’t assume this is a way for the top brass to sell stock early on bad news. Rick Munarriz makes the logical leap that this marketplace could become the underpinnings of Google Bank. He could be correct. The company currently wants to organize the world’s information, why not our money as well. I’m game. What’s the interest rate?
