« June 17, 2007 | Main | June 19, 2007 »
Audi R8
June 18, 2007
At the UC For The The Trading Floor Conference in NYC we happen to be situated in The Audi Building. Enjoy the shots.
Blogged via Wireless Handheld
Link this |
Email this |
Leave comment
Trackback URL: Audi R8
Technorati
Del.icio.us
BoingBoing
Slashdot
Digg
Spurl
Furl
In NYC for Unified Communications on the Trading Floor
June 18, 2007
I am in NYC now and soon will be heading over to the Unified Communications on the Trading Floor conference which I will be moderating later today. Here are the details.
Link this |
Email this |
Leave comment
Trackback URL: In NYC for Unified Communications on the Trading Floor
Technorati
Del.icio.us
BoingBoing
Slashdot
Digg
Spurl
Furl
RingCentral Update
June 18, 2007
If you have any doubt the hosted communications market is growing, you need to look no further than RingCentral who tells me their customer acquisition rate has grown at twice the rate of last year. The company does not offer VoIP but instead, a virtual office service allowing you to have the features and functions of a much larger company on a less expensive and pay as you go basis.
The service works with any phone system, such as a cell phone allowing a full featured auto attendant to front end calls. The company is focusing on the under 10 user market and Boris Elpinier the company’s VP of Marketing tells me they have tens of thousands of customers.
Boris and I met at the recent Communications Developer Conference in Santa Clara where he went on to tell me his service has the benefit of allowing you to start with a single client and doesn’t force you to use VoIP. Boris went on to say the SMB space uses fax more than he initially thought they would and thankfully his service supports fax.
Elpinier went on to say the value proposition for prospective customers is that for the price of a featureless 800 number or a fax service you can have both using RingCentral. There are a number of ways to build a hosted service and Boris is proud to say the company has built all of their technology themselves. One benefit he says is their ability to rapidly roll out new features.
He also explained some of the customers currently using the service use it to have a US telephone presence.
When asked what’s new, Boris told me he sees his service integrating more closely with more applications and services his customers use. Some vertical markets seem especially attractive. Real estate for example. He mentioned the service could have a virtual tour library allowing a person to drive by a house and see a for sale sign with a phone number which gives details about the house.
Once called, the dwelling details can be elaborated on. In the process the broker can be notified someone is at a specific house. They can then call the prospective purchaser and potentially meet them at the house on the spot.
Continuing the real estate line of services, there may be a fax package specifically designed for mortgage brokers.
A great feature I am seeing more and more of is the company’s mobile client allowing Caller ID masking so when you call a customer from a cell phone your 800 number and not your cell phone number is displayed on the called parties’ phone.
The service has some big news coming soon which will make the service even more useful but I can’t tell you yet what it is. Be sure to sign up for a TMCnet news alert on RingCentral or check out the RingCentral news page to stay posted.
See also: VoIP Service Provider RingCentral Delivers 'Click-to-Call' Technology to Real Estate Agents.
Link this |
Email this |
Leave comment
Trackback URL: RingCentral Update
Technorati
Del.icio.us
BoingBoing
Slashdot
Digg
Spurl
Furl
VoIP Killer App From Skype
June 18, 2007
I am convinced after speaking with Paul Amery of Skype at TMC’s recent Communications Developer Conference that one serious killer application in our market is the integration of VoIP applications and ecosystems of partners. Now I use VoIP loosely in this article… IP communications is a more accurate term.
The point is, adding services like avatars to conversations and embedding games is an amazing way to extend the functionality of a conversation.
Paul gave the example of how playing checkers while Skyping with his family kept the kids on the phone much longer than a Skype call alone. Checkers is just one of the applications bundled into Skype as an Extra.
Remember, we are in an ADD (attention defecit disorder) society. This point was driven home at a TMC team lunch last week when one of my coworkers said his son’s baseball team consisted of 15 kids wanting to play catcher. Another coworker commented that 10 years ago no one wanted to play catcher. It seems in today’s ADD driven society kids need to keep themselves busy at all times (as well as many adults by the way. Can you say Crackberry? ;) )
For the corporate ADD sufferer, we have similar solutions such as collaboration solutions like WebEx to keep others paying attention.
VoIP isn’t needed to have this added value but a VoIP client supporting easy to access libraries of applications is what Skype has on its hands. Ten years ago it would have been impossible to guess IP communications would be the enabler of vast communities consisting of millions of people who start with a phone call and end up playing games and/or transforming themselves into farm animals or other avatars as they converse.
Now that we’ve arrived at this point, one wonders what’s next.
Link this |
Email this |
Leave comment
Trackback URL: VoIP Killer App From Skype
Technorati
Del.icio.us
BoingBoing
Slashdot
Digg
Spurl
Furl
Borderware's SBC Strategy
June 18, 2007
MidMarket Session Border Contoller
Over the past few years the Session Border Control market has seen some change. At the high end of the market there are companies like Acme Packet and Nextone. These companies generally focus on features, features oh and more features. In fact a recent meeting with Seamus Hourihan of Acme Packet was one of the most information-packed discussions I have ever had. For about 40 minutes, Seamus focused on feature after feature being added to their SBC solution. The new announcements were quite impressive and likely intimidating to the competition.
But while companies like Acme Packet have done a great job of creating a nice barrier to entry in the high end of the market, other companies are effectively focusing on providing solutions for smaller corporations and service providers.
Case in point is Borderware. Recently I spent some time with Jeff Carr the company’s VP and General Manager of the SIP Solutions Group and he shared with me how his company has been very successful selling SBC solutions to network equipment providers (NEPs) and OEMs this past year.
Their solution is like a purpose-built switch for SIP and VoIP. For carriers this is a great solution. When it comes to NEPs like Mitel they are working with such companies to integrate their solutions into NEP applications.
Jeff tells me the message my readers should leave with is Borderware is the company offering a more flexible and cost-effective SBC solution. So while competitive products could have entry costs of $100k their solution starts at $5,000 and can scale to 40,000 concurrent sessions.
Of course you will give up some features and functionality but you might be surprised to learn performance is something you may not give up at all. Why? Well you see the Borderware solution is based on software and more specifically runs on Solaris and can utilize Intel or Sparc processors.
Using commercial off the shelf technology (COTS) such as this you get the same performance at one fifth the cost according to Carr. Most importantly, his company is not in the hardware business and you are free to run your SBC on the hardware you see fit.
There are immense benefits to software-based SBC solutions as they give you the flexibility to choose the platform you want to run on and you are able to scale the solution with a curve directly correlating to Moore’s Law. As an entry-level SBC with the added benefit of choosing your own hardware, Borderware is worth a close look.
Link this |
Email this |
Leave comment
Trackback URL: Borderware's SBC Strategy
Technorati
Del.icio.us
BoingBoing
Slashdot
Digg
Spurl
Furl
Lifesize
June 18, 2007
Near Telepresence at a Fraction of the Cost
There seems to be no doubt if your company has corporate jets you can afford and will likely embrace a telepresence system from a company like Cisco or Polycom and spend up to $300k per unit to do so. But for those companies who might think twice about spending the equivalent of the average US house on their videoconferencing solution, there are choices.
One such choice comes from a company called Lifesize who has been making lots of noise in the HD videoconferencing market. Lifesize sits in the market at the midrange, providing excellent video quality at a fraction of the cost of the big boys. The goal of the company is to be the price/performance leader and I can vouch for the quality of their technology as I had a chance to see it for myself. At one megabit per second the quality was impressive and at 512kbps the quality did degrade with some pixilation but it was still acceptable.
Many have made the point that $300k is a major investment for telepresence and perhaps this is why the entry level cost of $8k for the Lifesize solution seems absolutely cheap. If you want a MCU which allows three others to join in the call, the price jumps 50% to a still relatively palatable $12k. In addition, the Lifesize system interoperates with solutions from other vendors.
So if your company has a corporate jet and you are still reading this article you may be snickering at how the common enterprise can’t pony up millions for their videoconferencing solution. For those of you who have limited budgets and are looking for great quality videoconferencing without breaking the financial or bandwidth bank, you should look seriously at Lifesize.
Link this |
Email this |
Leave comment
Trackback URL: Lifesize
Technorati
Del.icio.us
BoingBoing
Slashdot
Digg
Spurl
Furl
Shunra
June 18, 2007
Developing applications for local computers is one thing but once you factor in the latency generated by wide area networks you can significantly reduce productivity if users are forced to wait for painfully slow applications to refresh screens and provide data updates. In order to help speed up the process of writing effective applications for WANs Shunra has recently released a New WAN optimization and application acceleration selection service.
You may remember Shunra has been a benefactor to TMC labs for about a decade providing their Cloud product which has been instrumental at simulating WAN traffic at our labs over the years.
In a recent sit down with the executive management team of Shunra Software I learned how the company has taken its excellent suite of technologies and began offering them up as services. The suite of services includes but is not limited to application profiling and surge testing, allowing developers to be sure applications are performing within the correct parameters – even when pushed to the limit.
Of course a use for such technology is ensuring VoIP applications are running efficiently but the product/service also excels in other areas. For example when choosing between various vendors, Shunra can help you company set up a virtual network environment. The purpose of such a network is to ensure you choose the right applications/solutions for your particular environment.
As you might imagine, Shunra’s technology is of use to service providers and not surprisingly AT&T resells the company’s technology. This works out well for AT&T as they are able to help customers see when potential SLA-breaking problems are the fault of application design and not the network.
The management team briefing which consisted of Michai Lesser Dir of Product Marketing, Thomas Charlton, President and CEO, Matt Reid VP Worldwide Marketing and Boaz Grinvald Founder and Executive Vice President really drove home the point that their tools help application developers be proactive and not reactive when developing WAN-based applications.
As corporations turn more often to applications which utilize SOA, XML and Mashups it seems inevitable that without proper testing beforehand, you run the risk of writing applications which zap productivity.
Link this |
Email this |
Leave comment
Trackback URL: Shunra
Technorati
Del.icio.us
BoingBoing
Slashdot
Digg
Spurl
Furl