VoIP Blog - Tehrani.com

March 18, 2007

 

For all the advancement we have seen these past years, syncing directories seems to be the punishment we all have to deal with as a byproduct of what we call progress.

 

Thankfully it seems Ericsson has solved the problem of the separate mobile and fixed line lives many of us suffer with.

 

Ericsson has recently launched their Mobility Gateway and the mobile world will be forever better off for it.

 

The gateway is a Linux-based solution which supports the integration of most major cell phones with all major IP PBXs. Mobile client support includes Symbian, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and Windows XP/Vista. Host PBX support includes Nortel, Cisco, Avaya, Siemens, Alcatel-Lucent and Surprise! Ericsson.

 

Sophisticated tariff management is built into the client and it can actually determine the most cost effective way to get your call delivered. In some countries a callback is the best solution and in others, IP though the corporate PBX is the best choice.

 

The typical find-me follow-me services are supported allowing multiple phones to ring at once. There is web management, a mobile SIP client, voice recording support, directory integration, the ability to scale beyond 1,000 users/system, click to dial, remote management, presence view and more.

 

There is also the ability to do a soft client handover from WiFi to cellular and back. Presence and calendar integration allows the Ericsson Mobility Gateway to stop you from being bothered by calls during meetings or when your presence is anything but available.

 

The kicker in all this is the IMS integration as Ericsson is selling systems to service providers as well. This entire solution can be sold as a managed service allowing enterprise customers to integrate these mobility applications with other applications not yet imagined.

 

Part of my discussion with Frank Puglia, Director of Corporate Communications centered around the possibility of Ericsson working with companies and providers to provide access to a universal corporate directory allowing more seamless business to business communications. While this last point is more theoretical than the rest of my discussion it shows Ericsson is really thinking about the future of unified communications and more importantly is leveraging its strength in mobility to make life better for business professionals everywhere.

 

What I really like about this solution is the appliance-based nature of the gateway and its ability to be put in between just about any device and any phone system. Hats off to the Ericsson for developing such a productivity boosting solution.

March 18, 2007

Recently I had a chance to meet with executives at Objectworld and I couldn’t help but walk away impressed with the technology the company has developed. Their two products consist of CallAttendant which allows you to connect your existing PBX to their unified messaging and unified communications solution. The company also develops UC Sever affording you all the features of CallAttendant with a SIP-based VoIP phone system thrown in for good measure.

 

The company feels it is positioned very well for the wave of convergence taking place in communications and they are quick to point out that VoIP in and of itself does not signify convergence but it is when applications become converged that convergence is truly happening.

 

UC Server is software based and since it is 100% SIP based there is no legacy technology to worry about. Since the system is hardware agnostic you can leverage Moore’s law to grow your company with ever-faster servers.

 

The company believes it is positioned well as it sells to IT VARs and its solutions are easy to configure. For example the system presents you with a tab in Active Directory and uses Microsoft Wizardsto configure the UC system.

 

In addition it auto discovers phones from companies like Aastra, Polycom and Snom. Although their sweet spot is 50-400 users their systems can scale to the thousands of users.

 

There are two reasons why resellers should take this company very seriously. The first is 45% margins and the second is their guarantee of the solution – including support, from end to end (depending on phone model).

 

They think SIP will do for communications what the USB port has done for computing. I would agree that SIP has indeed leveled the telecom playing field and the irony is you can actually put Objectworld’s Unified Communicator on a USB-based memory stick if you so choose.

 

But still I would add the comments above about Moore’s Law to the mix of why telecom will never bee the same. It is the power of SIP + HMP that really enables the next generation of communications solutions to flourish. In addition it allows small companies in communications to innovate with grandiose vision.

March 18, 2007

 

Since that time they have emerged as one of the strongest players in the testing market.

 

I asked about the current customer mix and Andy explained that 35-40% of customers are service providers. Ditto for equipment manufacturers. The rest of the company’s customers are enterpries.

 

I asked what 2007 will bring and Andy says he thinks 2006 was the year of hype for IMS and 2007 will be the year of RFPs. Andy says there are huge RFPs floating around the industry from the largest operators. Some are public he says and others are not.

 

He went on to say equipment vendors in general are going from providing generic IMS building blocks to providing services.

 

Spirent has specific test methodologies for testing these IMS services such as push to talk, presence, park and XDM (an OMA XML specification).

 

Huckridge went on to describe his view of IMS versus FMC. He described FMC as the wheels of the car and IMS as the car itself.

 

He believes FMC services are advancing IMS as they are the fist set of services out the door. “One is enabling the other,” he says.

 

He continued, “Service providers need revenue generating applications. Spirent has test plans for what we think will make money.”

 

Other services he mentioned were the fusion of WiFi, landline and cell phone calls.

 

From there we discussed the challenges of IMS which is of course the multivendor nature of the architecture. He explained this leads to non-synchronous software upgrade schedules which makes interoperability a challenge.

 

He went on to explain that the world is evolving from a few hardware providers such as Nortel, Lucent and Ericsson to numerous service providers who have custom SIP stacks. The need for interoperability is as great as ever but interconnectivity challenges persist.

 

This worries the large carriers for obvious reasons. He continued by saying IMS is going to make interconnecting between carriers two orders of magnitude more difficult than SS7 and ISUP. Expect to see Spirent coming up with test plans to deal with these issues and more to help the world transition more smoothly so as to take advantage of the benefits of IP multimedia subsystem solutions.