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Oracle
June 6, 2007
The Oracle machine seems to keep rolling along day after day, week after week. Not only does the company continue to acquire best of breed companies and add them to their product/service offering they are also busy spending time educating the masses on a number of topics.
I recently came across some informative white papers from Oracle on a variety of topics.
TMCnet’s Stefania Viscusi wrote an article recently about Transforming IT which focuses on an Oracle white paper of a similar name. The white paper takes the readers through convergence, good governance and focuses a good deal on hosted services. Here is the Oracle white paper if you want to learn more.
Another article by Stefania details CRM/call center on-demand solutions and features a case study on how hosted call center services helped an SMB provide better service in their virtual call center.
According to Stefania, “With the solution, not only were they able to better manage incoming call requests and better answer to caller needs, they were also able to allow agents to work from home. The solution routes calls to a virtual network of agents to collect information and get technicians out into the field.”
Here is the white paper on CRM Call Center on Demand for more information.
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Nortel on Open-Source Communications
June 6, 2007
Tony Rybczynski – affectionately known within Nortel as Tony Ryb is one of the top thought leaders in the communications space and has been with Nortel as long as I can remember. He has also been a TMC columnist and speaker at Internet Telephony Conference & Expo for a decade.
He recently sent me this e-mail about open-source communications and Asterisk and I thought is was worth passing along. Perhaps his ideas will spur a dialogue on this “guest blog” from Tony Rybczynski.
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Tom Malone of MIT has observed that the most important innovation of the 21st century will be new ways of organizing work, this enabled through the low cost global Internet and collaboration technologies. Open source software is one good example, though there is an open source motorcycle under development in China!
The open source software movement appeals to most everyone. For technologists and the vendor community, it represents a new way of developing basic technology building blocks, with the promise of lower development costs and accelerated solution development. For enterprises, it promises more open more agile systems, less dependence on the telecom vendor and ultimately lower cost. Open source is not a panacea and there are multiple non-technology reasons why some open sources have experienced limited success: take open source routers for example.
Growth of the IP Telephony market has created opportunities for IP Telephony open source software, Asterisk being the best known. Asterisk alone does not make an IP Telephony system, which has to include end points devices (like SIP desktop phones, WiFi handsets and various forms of soft clients), media gateways to the public network, to legacy PBXs and to fax machines, and ancillary areas such as voicemail, conference bridges and music-on-hold and announcement.
There are generally, three ways that open source software can find its way into enterprise and SMB environments.
1. Some enterprises may embark on being their own system integrator and roll their own implementations, assembling parts from wherever. While a small percentage of tech savvy enterprises may go this way, this is not a core competency of the vast majority of enterprises, nor an area with adequate business value to warrant investment. UPenn has embarked on this approach, and stated (at a session at the spring Voicecon) that this was driven more by the need to integrate with back office applications. Cost reduction (on a TCO basis) over their existing Centrex service was roughly the same for a number of IP Telephony systems they evaluated. At the same conference, the Southern Company presented their application of IP Telephony open source to build a paging system for 200 users.
2. Some may embark on working with ‘open source IP Telephony suppliers’ who undertake the SI function and wrap technology and services into a product solution. These can potentially meet individual customer needs, but only if they meet the feature/functionality, reliability, scalability, scalability, regulatory and support requirements of the buyer. However, enterprises need to ask the question of what’s the path to unified communications, an area which is not addressed by the open source community in an integrated fashion. In fact, with IBM and Microsoft entering the UC market, IP Telephony RFQs are increasingly being replaced by UC RFQs (at least directionally). We believe that this raises the stakes for these open source suppliers and will diminish the appeal of IP-Telephony-only open source solutions.
3. Some will buy open source unknowingly from an established telecom supplier who have integrated open source software into an IP Telephony system. For all intents and purposes, this is the ‘traditional IP PBX/Unified Communications market place.
What’s our view on open source? Nortel is focused on delivering solutions meeting enterprise and SMB requirements and always looking for ways to lower the development cost while accelerating development time. In general, we view open source as an interesting software technology that is useful for many applications. In fact, Nortel already leverages open source technologies such as Linux and SIP protocol stacks in a number of our solutions.
Nortel is committed to transforming telephony into a Unified Communications software application, and we are actively investing R&D towards this objective both individually and working with partners such as Microsoft and IBM. Openness is a key design principle, leveraging SIP, open APIs, Web Services and SOA, and will continue to be one of the focal points of our solution development strategy.
Do you see this differently?
Tony
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Communigate Unified Communications
June 6, 2007
I just recently demoed a complete unified communications platform based on Flash and Flex2 and all I can say is wow. Pronto! Is a complete communications media center with unified communications built-in. The application has a great user interface that is faster than AJAX technology which is typically powering the latest web 2.0 applications like Google maps.
Another benefit of Flash is the system is more secure. AJAX applications are currently not quite as secure as they can be. Sure they are getting better all the time but the benefits of Flash are so great I don’t see a reason to use AJAX for such an application.
I imagine this solution took a great deal of effort to program and it is worth it as a single program can handle mailboxes with voice and video and the application can also handle videos, music, IM and more.
It is worth checking out Pronto! for your self. Visit the Communigate Rich Media Internet Communications Community on TMCnet for more information.
Also be sure to read thoughts on this offering from TMCnet’s Greg Galitzine and Tom Keating who has a controversial twist to the news.
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Google Goes Green
June 6, 2007
Google announced today it has acquired PeakStream. The company makes tools for programming multiple processors and this technology can be applied to multicore chips such as GPUs or graphical processing units.
Speculation exists the company may have made this purchase so as to allow Google’s servers to bring the GPUs into the mix when writing programs. Google’s programming language is highly abstracted from the hardware and if the company can find a way to leverage the powerful GPUs in the hundreds of thousands if not millions of servers it owns, the result could be an increase in server efficiency.
In the end, this efficiency increase will save Google electricity, resources and of course time, as processing will take place much faster.This acquisition could be looked at as the ultimate “green” play… allowing Google to take advantage of millions of dormant graphical cores in its servers. As I mentioned yesterday, the world is going green, prompting TMC to launch it’s Green Conference in Los Angeles later this year. This news is further proof companies can lower their carbon footprint while simultaneously saving money.
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