VoIP Blog - Tehrani.com

January 3, 2007

I recently noticed the new VoIP call recording channel on TMCnet and thought it was worth checking out as VoIP call recording is becoming a fast growing area? Why? Well call centers need to record as many calls as feasible to protect themselves and also to ensure they comply with myriad regulations.

 

In addition – and speaking of myriad regulations – Sox regulations are quite onerous and public and private companies need to consider recording all calls to comply with various state and federal laws.

 

This channel will be a good resource for call recording in the world of IP communications and as I perused it just now I learned In-Stat says 7.9% of US households use a VoIP service. Pretty amazing. I also think the graphics are really different. Nicely done.

January 3, 2007

About ten years ago I was waiting to be seated at a restaurant when a man came to the area in which I was waiting and started to open the vending machines. He had a few empty sacks with him and after about five minutes had filled the sacks with money. It was at this point I realized the value of making small amounts of money in massive volume. I figured if it can be done with gumballs you can do it with anything.

 

After a recent meeting with David Cork the CEO at Natural Convergence I think telecom holds another vending machine opportunity service providers are wise to pay attention to. In this case the hosted key system market.

 

David cites the fact that there is an installed base of about 32 million key systems out there and they are about 12 years old. The replacement market for key systems will be a massive opportunity according to Cork who tells me his company counts on a 7-9% churn replacement per year. Furthermore they hope to sell to 30% of this market which is obviously ambitious.

 

Natural Convergence is a Canadian company and is now part of the Terry Matthews family of companies. In a recent article on Sir Terry Matthews, I mention how the companies Terry invests in work together. Here is an excerpt:

 

Still the companies function loosely in the style of a Japanese keiretsu where a central bank supplies a group of companies across industries. These companies work well together and rely on the central bank for support. In this case, Terry is the bank and certainly understands the industry as well as any of the people in his massive group of companies. This understanding of the industry is what differentiates Terry from a run of the mill bank making investments.

 

It is for this reason you may not be surprised to hear Natural Convergence products work with Mitel (another Matthews company) phones. But David can tell you with a straight face the Mitel decision is also best for them and for customers as the Canadian phone company is spending money on developing better phones and this is not the case for all PBX vendors in the market. It also helps that the companies are geographically close to one another.

 

Now if you think the IP Centrex market is the same as the hosted key system market you would be incorrect. The key system market is not leading edge and they generally focus on TCO instead of whiz-bang must have flashy features. In addition, key systems typically have keys (big surprise) representing different lines and park functions.

 

The company's product is the Silhouette 3.0 and it is SIP-based except for the phones. Yes the world is moving towards SIP but here is an exception to the rule. The reason for this divergence from SIP is that Natural Convergence phones do not require configuration like most SIP devices. The user settings do not reside in the device but instead in the network so no changes are lost if a phone dies. Obviously there is a huge focus on simplicity here. It should be noted however the system will talk with SIP devices if needed.

 

Another area the company prides itself on is getting service providers operational rapidly. A few months is what they tell me. In addition many of their customers are growing rapidly -- between 35%-50% quarter over quarter in fact.

 

As you might imagine you can configure phones from a web browser – this of course means less trips to see customers on premise and this translates into lower support costs.

 

One last point worth noting is the solution is complimentary to a BroadSoft or Sylantro hosted IP Centrex solution. How could this be? Well the Silhouette solution is optimized for the key system market and the other systems are not. So a service provider may consider dual solutions to enable the best ROI for each market segment.

 

Natural Convergence is certainly focusing on what seems to be the fastest growing area of business communications systems and although I think the 30% market share number is highly aggressive, the opportunity certainly exists to convert the CPE-based small business into a user of hosted solutions. So if you are a service provider looking for a new revenue stream perhaps you should consider selling hosted key system services to small business and in the end collecting all the gumball profits for yourself. Just remember to have lots of empty sacks lying around.

January 3, 2007

I have had many requests for a set of IP communications predictions and I have a bunch floating through my mind. But still, I don’t think I am prepared to put them in writing. I may or may not at some point soon. But I do want to make a tech prediction. Within the next 10-15 years we will see the rise of multiple kids going from starving youngsters to successful millionaires/billionaires. They will owe much of their success to the $100 laptop.

 

January 3, 2007

Today is a pretty big day for me personally. As you know, TMCnet is the world’s leading site for communications and technology information, community building, etc. In fact this past December 2006 saw our traffic reach just under 2 million unique visitors. Our previous record was just over one million.

 

This is a number unheard of in the competitive space in which we play and we are proud of this fact.

 

So while our site is not only successful it continues to shine, we knew it also was a busy site. But the site has done so well for us and the industry we serve we were careful not to change it too much.

 

Eventually though we decided we should streamline TMCnet making it more customizable while allowing easier access to information depending on your specific needs.

 

It is for this reason I am happy to unveil phase one of our redesign. We expect further streamlining to take place soon as well as a slew of other enhancements which have been in the works for many months.

 

I would like your honest feedback on this new look. So far most people think this new design is much better than what we had before. But hopefully a wider audience can give us a more balanced perspective. You can e-mail me directly with comments.

 

Thanks!

January 3, 2007

A sidebar to: Sir Terry Matthews

Aside from being a successful serial entrepreneur Terry owns much of Kanata, Ontario and is a major landlord owning seemingly every building in site -- some were sold to Alcatel a few years back. In addition to the buildings he also owns a four diamond hotel which I had a chance to stay in named the BrookStreet Hotel.

 

The hotel was fantastic and contains a gourmet restaurant with amazing food. Be sure to try the bread and olive oil if you get a chance. The hotel is filled with artwork from local students and to my untrained eye it all looked great. Of course the rooms all had Mitel phones and mine even had one with an AT&T cordless phone. On the Mitel phones their was caller ID with name dialing from room to room meaning I got to see who was calling before I answered the phone. The desks are designed for businesspeople with a funky new age design.

 

The style might be what would happen if you crossed the Delano Hotel in Miami with a pure business hotel. You get the best of both worlds. Of course your ocean view is replaced with snow but then again you don’t pay Delano’s rates either. :-)

 

Apparently the hotel I stayed at pales in comparison to the one Terry owns in Wales named the Celtic Manor Resort. Hopefully one day I will get a chance to visit this hotel as well.

January 3, 2007

Terry Matthews is a living legend in communications and I suppose the only person I will get to meet with a “Sir” in front of their name. For years many people have told me I must meet Terry and for one reason or another we just never connected. Over the years Terry has started 66 companies and only 3 have been unsuccessful meaning they were subsequently rolled back into other companies in the “Matthews family.”.

 

We often hear of serial entrepreneurs but what separates Terry from virtually all others is his staggering success rate. He not only starts companies at a rapid pace he starts companies that succeed. How many people can boast such a success rate and furthermore in primarily one industry such as communications?

 

After my meeting in Kanata, Ontario at Mitel’s headquarters, I left feeling more like I had the honor of breaking bread with a celebrity than listening to someone tell me about their company. Terry certainly gave me a great overview of things he feels are important in the market.

Terry being Welsh has an accent that reminds me a great deal of Sean Connery (who was actually born in Scotland – but hey, I am American and we aren’t supposed to be able to tell the difference). So it was as if 007 was explaining the world of telecom to me. And although Terry’s viewpoint resonated with me it paled in comparison to the enthusiasm with which Terry spoke. It is important to point out Sir Terry Matthews is a billionaire and doesn’t need to work. He works because he loves what he does. He obviously really loves what he does and it shows as soon as you meet him.

 

Perhaps this is the reason my meeting was like trying to drink from a fire hydrant and I felt as if each sentence Terry spoke had half dozen hyperlinks in it. Throughout the conversation there were references to this company or that and the myriad ways they work together and fit into the telecom ecosystem. I wish I could have slowed Terry down by about 75% and then Googled every fifth word so I could ask the most intelligent questions possible. As I think back to the meeting I still have the lingering feeling I had in the meeting. I sort of had a rush of energy coupled with intense brain activity. This is the same brain rush feeling I got when I decided to cram for a Civil Engineering final with nothing but bottles of diet soda and bags of family-sized potato chips.

 

But you didn’t come here to learn about the Rich Tehrani finals diet (one that ensured you passed but also gained 10 pounds a year) – you want to know more about Terry and his suite of companies. So as my brain rush subsides I get to thinking Terry not only sees a vibrant telecom ecosystem, he has developed an ecosystem of companies who fit into his own telecom ecosystem meaning they work and play nice with each other. Terry has encouraged all the companies in the family to work together on interoperability but one of the company founders told me financial prudence dictates his company work together with other family members when it makes sound business sense -- such as when a customer immediately benefits from such collaboration. You can imagine the development costs of each of these companies ballooning out of control if they were forced to work with every other company in the family right off the bat.

 

Still the companies function loosely in the style of a Japanese keiretsu where a central bank supplies a group of companies across industries. These companies work well together and rely on the central bank for support. In this case, Terry is the bank and certainly understands the industry as well as any of the people in his massive group of companies. This understanding of the industry is what differentiates Terry from a run of the mill bank making investments.

 

One of the areas of excitement for Terry is certainly Mitel --perhaps the crown jewel of the family. Terry enthusiastically discussed the company’s latest PBX which can scale to 60,000 ports eliminating the need to have multiple PBXs in the product family. This saves development time and makes it much easier to do things like Microsoft LCS integration. Feel free to contact Mitel directly for details

 

In addition Terry extolled the virtues of one of the newer companies in the family, New Heights. The company makes products which allows service providers to communicate with enterprise equipment in a controlled way across the DMARC or the interface point between the customer and provider. This allows you to get around the data problems of firewalls and the refresh rates of a PBX. Using the company's products for example a company could access hosting services from Broadsoft or Sylantro while allowing these hosted services to communicate with LCS, Lotus Notes or any other server which may consist of important information such as directory services.

 

There is so much more but while I took copious notes, TMCnet's Group Editorial Director recorded the meeting and has a bit more. Sign up for a TMCnet news alert on Terry Mathews to be alerted when this article comes out.

 

I am looking forward to speaking with Terry in the future and the next time I will have to remember to carry a recording device as well. I just hope my path crosses Terry's before he launches another 66 companies. But still at this rate that may just be a few short years from now.

Also see sidebar: Kanata's Landlord

January 3, 2007

With all this talk of net neutrality and AT&T’s recent concessions is it possible a much greater net neutrality problem will come not from Texas based AT&T but Redmond’s Microsoft. According to Scott Cleland and the Wall Street Journal, there is huge potential for web discrimination against small companies when using Microsoft’s Vista operating system.

 

You see the browser has software to spot phishers and the system does not classify over 20 million legitimate small businesses as “phish free” so they have deployed a guilty until proven innocent model.

 

In my view this is not an intentional way to stop small companies from being successful as this blog entry suggests.

 

Still the effects of this filter could be disastrous to small business and I suppose Microsoft will be forced to deal with this problem in some way soon before this becomes a media fiasco rivaling Ferrari laptopgate.