June 2007 Archives

Packet Island

June 19, 2007 11:44 AM | 0 Comments
Packet Island Redefine Network Management
 
“It is not just about kbps” is the statement ringing in my head after a discussion I had at TMC’s Communications Developer Conference in Santa Clara, CA last month with Praveen Kumar the co-founder and president of Packet Island. As Praveen pointed out, a network can become flooded with packets when VoIP is deployed. In some cases, packet volumes can increase by a factor of ten or more.
 
To help companies cope with the ever-increasing number of packets on a network the company makes an appliance which can sit in front of the PBX and monitor quality metrics. For those of you interested in the open-source world, the company also makes a software agent for Asterisk. Furthermore Packet Island has partnered with Fonality, Digium and Epygi.
 
Our conversation focused on IP Centrex for a while and more specifically why the adoption of this technology has been slower than expected. Praveen believes the reason has to do with quality and this concurs with some informal research I have done in the area.
 
This is why his company is targeting service providers and VARs with their solutions… The goal is allowing his customers to better manage VoIP on the networks of their own customers.
 
Packet Island will even take care of tier two support and VAR training if needed. The company has a service which monitors VoIP lines for a $3 per month. If the pricing sounds familiar it is because AT&T will charge you a bit more for its WirePro service to monitor their PSTN lines.
 
The eventual goal of the company is to become the HP OpenView of the market where it relates to SaaS. This equates to hosted network monitoring for the acronym-challenged.
 
My take on the company is they are positioned well as companies are getting more and more excited about the potential to offload their technology problems to others. This is especially true in smaller companies where there is no money to hire expensive MIS people to handle the network management.

Cantata IMG/MSP

June 19, 2007 9:38 AM | 1 Comment
Cantata's IMG/MSP Speeds Application Delivery Times for Service Providers.
 
Recently I spoke with Peter Vescusi about Canata’s latest IMG roll out… Verison 10.3.3. As you may recall this is a pretty feature-driven release with more SIP methods, SIP and SS7 translation and load balancing allowing a single IP address to represent a farm of IMGs.
 
At the Communications Developer Conference a few weeks in Santa Clara, CA I had a chance to catch up with Cantata’s James Rafferty who told me the new release has been seeing positive deployment in the telecom world.
 
For example, service providers are thrilled to be able to do multiple ENUM registry lookups with up to four DNS servers. This is great for peering fabrics which of course explains why I frequently see James at voice peering events.
 
Since we were at a developer show I suppose this was the reason we got to talking about the MSP 1010 which is similar to the IMG (he calls it a sister product) but has API hooks allowing a developer to build things like transcoding under API control.
 
You can also write TCAP-based applications allowing lookups for LNP. You can also write a CNAM look-up for Caller-ID.
 
From there we discussed time to market which Jim tells me is about 90 days with the MSP and he contrasts this with developing with boards which can take 6-9 months according to James.
 
An interesting topic which came up again and again at the show is fax support. Many products have interoperability glitches when using T.38. Jim says their solutions work more smoothly than others. This is not surprising from the company which invented the fax board when it was Brooktrout many years ago.
 
As you have likely read before, the company says its products are IMS-compliant allowing you to deploy today without having to wait for standards bodies. He does mention some Interop testing and/or tweaking may be needed in some scenarios.
 
On the subject of IMS the company sees video streaming and gaming as a few of the areas where there is tremendous growth happening. His company also sees IVR, prepaid services and conferencing as other applications with real-world growth in the IP space.
 
Out discussion led us to agree that IP allows services with several disparate elements to work better with one another. To that end he sees many service provider deploying blended services which take advantage of voice, video, IM and presence.
 
So what’s my take? I am told as of our meeting, 55 carriers had purchased the IMG. I find this number to be impressive and it seems the company has the potential for great success with IMG/MSP sister products.

Sitting on the Tarmac -- NXTComm

June 19, 2007 7:34 AM | 0 Comments
Chicago weather has struck again and I am enjoying the hospitality of the American Airlines flight crew as we wait for the weather to improve. So far the delay is estimated to be 30 minutes. I hope to get to NXTComm eventually. Oh, and here are the details on the party.

PhoneGnome

June 19, 2007 7:27 AM | 0 Comments
Is PhoneGnome from Televolution the ultimate CLEC 2.0 Enabler?
 
We know the story all too well. Thousands of CLECs backed by the venture capital market flooded the telecom space in the hopes of all becoming the next AT&T. The goal back in the late nineties was to roll out fiber as fast as possible with no regard for getting any customers.
 
If you remember, at the time, the stock market didn’t even value profit… It was all about eyeballs, miles of fiber and potential for future profit. Profit was an “evil” word as it allowed markets to place a valuation on your company. Many former CLEC heads tell me they wanted to focus more on customer acquisition and their investors directed them to focus on digging up asphalt as a place to lay glass and not revenue generation.
 
To make matters worse, the ILECs were throwing up roadblock after roadblock making it difficult for DSL providers and CLECs to sell their services over ILEC controlled pipes.
 
We know how the story ends. The market crashed, investors panicked and few CLECs had any customers and many went belly up.
 
Today the cable companies are the most formidable competitors to the ILECs. Still, we generally don’t expect the cable and phone companies to be leaders in rolling out new services. These larger companies are generally behind the curve when it comes to experimenting with new applications.
 
Remember, Vonage was the first major telephone service provider with a soft client. Vonage did not invent the soft client mind you; they just decided they wanted to be among the first ITSPs to distribute them to their customers.
 
Large service providers know they are slower to move than smaller companies and the promise of IMS is all about allowing telephone company partners to develop new network services on the cheap allowing the partner and telco to share in the profits.
 
Is this a good strategy? Absolutely. Will IMS be deployed globally overnight? Absolutely not.
 
In the mean time, there are a few solutions which allow application developers to deploy advanced telephony applications with little investment and with great potential.
 
One such solution is a CPE box called PhoneGnome. Made by Televolutionthe deviceis an advanced ATA with an API allowing applications to be rolled out on what has to be the most granular and targeted basis possible. You could provide service to one person on each street in the world and your deployment would be cost effective.
 
The box costs $30-$60 depending on volume and can be the easiest way in the world to provide advanced telephony service to customers on anyone’s broadband or phone network.
 
The benefit of this approach is application fine-tuning is a cinch. You can revise, refine, retune or redo your application development for just the cost of the developer. You don’t need any traditional and high-priced telco equipment.
 
In fact the absence of equipment in this model means developers can be of the software-only variety meaning access to many more programmers worldwide. One application already running on PhoneGnome is Dial Tone 2.0 where the dial tone you hear is replaced by a TellMe application asking you for or a contact or business name to call. Speech recognition and ensuing behind the scenes technical magic connects you with the party you want to call.
 
You could also develop a smart forwarding application like GrandCentral or virtually anything else. Years ago I wrote an article about if Google got into telephony they could provide an application which does a Google search on an incoming phone number. With tabbed browsing you could have a tab come up with a search for the number in the yellow pages, another search on the Better Business Bureau site and so on.
 
This sort of application can be built by anyone now. There are a variety of similar telephony mashups you can come up with in fact. You could develop an application which displays a map with the city and even address of the person calling you.
 
Call detail comes in via XML and at that point you can do whatever you want with the call. You could have it gracefully forward to voicemail or forwarded to an assistant or to your cell phone.
 
The potential here is quite staggering as the PhoneGnome devices sit in a home and can determine how long a household uses a phone. The device can establish identity trust via the phone company with a side benefit being built-in security.
 
Additionally there is the potential to correlate web and phone behavior. In the past I have written about how service providers can start making money by selling aggregate telephone data. Now, any company with enough boxes out on the network can have this same ability.
 
So Televolution allows anyone to take advantage of the most lucrative promises of the CLEC opportunity. You can now provide the advanced services and that’s where the real money is.
 
Service providers could use this sort of service to break out of their traditional markets if they choose to do so. FMC for example is a natural application stemming from this solution.
 
The technology can sit in a phone or router or even a video game. The company has a shared revenue model and can even help with distribution of the service. They also have a mobile client with many similar features to the home-based solution.
 
I am pretty blown away by this technology and it has much broader implications for the deployment of advanced telephony applications. Why? Well, for the first time, anyone can roll out enhanced services without the need to wait for a service provider to green light the project.
 
If the project is successful and you get 100,000 subscribers, you can then shop it around to service providers as a proven business model and have them help market and sell it. I see PhoneGnome as the ultimate solution to getting telephony applications rolled out quickly and efficiently and for this reason I think it the ultimate CLEC 2.0 enabler.

On my way to NXTComm

June 19, 2007 7:00 AM | 0 Comments

I am on my way to NXTComm now and am looking forward to seeing what's new at the event. I am also looking forward to seeing many of you at the NXTComm party TMC is having with Dialogic, Alliance Systems and others.

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Sangoma: From Open Source to Unified Communications

June 19, 2007 3:57 AM | 0 Comments
I recently had a chance to speak with David Mandelstam at the Communications Developer Conference last month in Santa Clara, CA. Sangoma was one of the highlights at the show as the company had produced a few record quarters in a row just prior to the event. Even more impressive the company turned in yet another record-breaking quarter of 24% growth quarter over quarter.
 
It was great to catch up with David and hear his thoughts on where the company is going. One thing I mentioned to David is how his customers consistently tell me how great the voice quality and reliability is of their cards. He mentioned the four areas the company wants to be known for are the two above as well as robustness and compatibility.
 
By all accounts Sangoma has done a good job of providing premium enabling technology cards for open-source communications at a price/performance level VARs and customers can get behind.
 
One interesting point he referenced was how Sangoma has been helping a number of open-source communications initiatives such as FreeSWITCH.
 
In addition the company is up to release an ISDN BRI card which David says is needed. He points out it will not have a Zaptel interface. David says the open-source BRI stack is not very good and no one has an interest in fixing it. Instead, Sangoma has purchased a commercial BRI stack and will soon make it available.
 
Mandelstam says there needs to be a good way to put blobs of closed source code into open-source so the two can be mixed together. This can be done with a socket-based architecture he says. He goes on to explain his company did the same thing with SS7 and may also do it with other stacks such as voice conferencing.
 
In fact in the future we can expect the company to come up with an open-source gateway/interface allowing you to hook anything into your open-source solution without falling foul of the Free Software Foundation.
 
One of the reasons Sangoma has been able to deliver such superb voice quality is the company’s partnership with Octasic, the company who makes echo canceling technology. Sangoma saw the opportunity to popularize Octasic’s solutions years before the rest of the open source market followed suit.
 
Another area the company is striving to be known for is availability and to make this a reality I am told the company keeps massive inventory allowing distributors to order and have product drop shipped immediately.
 
The primary competition in the market for Sangoma’s cards comes from Digium, the company behind Asterisk. Sangoma has an interesting relationship with Digium as they sell products which enable Asterisk-based telephony solutions and at the same time compete head to head with Digium for the sale of telephony boards.
 
Mandelstam mentioned his company supports many open-source initiatives and would definitely support Asterisk too if it were to be separated from Digium.
 
He also mentioned there is growing momentum behind FreeSWITCH and he further elaborated by saying that some people are using FreeSWITCH with no Asterisk at all. He says this is partially due to the licensing model and the code. He went on to explain that the second person to come along always does a better job than the first as they see what the [software] architecture could have been. David summed it up by saying, “The FreeSWITCH architecture and capability is better – not that there is anything terribly wrong with Asterisk.”
 
But even though so many people think of open-source telecom when the name Sangoma is mentioned, the company is soon looking beyond this space for even more growth. According to David they believe the UC market being driven by Microsoft has the potential to be somewhere between 50 and 100 times bigger than open-source telecom in terms of revenue.
 
So at the end of the day, Sangoma seems like they are in a great position to capitalize on the growing market for PC-based telephony cards regardless of operating system or open-source type. As the ultimate arms dealer if they can keep their reputation for voice quality, robustness, reliability, compatibility and availability they have a shot at growing nicely with the telecom market for years to come.
 
The author is a shareholder of Sangoma Technologies.

Skype Trunking

June 19, 2007 2:52 AM | 3 Comments
VoSKY Technologies Enables Skype Trunking and More
Many companies are using Skype in their business but generally speaking these are Skype islands which do not interconnect with the plethora of telephony equipment in the organization. For example the ACD is an integral part of many an enterprise yet native Skype does not have access to such niceties. For example, there is no centralized auto attendant on Skype calls coming into an enterprise.
 
A few years back when there was talk of eBay purchasing Skype and many critics who said eBay spent too much on the VoIP software company, I countered by saying Skype is one of the world’s largest and still fastest-growing telephone companies. This idea still holds true and the one thing most every pundit forgot to mention is the Skype opportunity in business.
 
There is a tremendous SMB and enterprise market for Skype to exploit by offering its network for the benefit of businesses everywhere.
 
At a keynote speech at Internet Telephony Conference & Expo in 2005, Skype CEO Niklas Zennstrom told the world for the first time that Skype is doing very well in the business world. But this usage is generally client-based and does not benefit the company from an infrastructure perspective. In other words, Skype is typically used in a one to one fashion without the benefit of connectivity with enterprise telephony infrastructure.
 
Enter VoSKY Technologies a company providing a simple solution to integrate Skype into your core telecommunications infrastructure. Now before I go any further I would like to point out that like all internet telephony solutions, Skype is at the mercy of the internet connection for its call and video quality.
 
I have had many conversations with people who tell me Skype quality is far superior to the PSTN and others where people tell me the opposite. In reality, everyone is right because VoIP depends on packet priority and needs a certain amount of bandwidth free of excess problems to work properly.
 
My personal experience has been great video conversations over relatively low bandwidth connections. Similarly my voice calls have usually been good when the bandwidth is there.
 
VoSKY executives tell me they have the only Skype branded business-class solution and as such they seem to be in a great position in the market. This certification I am told took many tests to achieve. Another benefit of being a Skype certified partner is the company gets access to Skype development a full 6-12 months in advance. Why is this important? If you aren’t Skype certified, your equipment can lag far behind the current Skype version.
 
So what are some of the benefits of this business-class solution? Well for one there is Skype-based click-to-call for business partners, coworkers and customers. The calls map into the VoSKY Exchange series of products.
 
I am told the reseller community is benefiting from selling VoSKY products as the sale is straightforward allowing a customer to have rapid Skype connectivity without the need to manage individual desktop clients. In addition the company can justify the price as the solution eliminates PSTN calls and goes native VoIP to Skype’s terminating network. A company gets the prevailing SkypeOut rates which are usually 2.1 cents per minute but can jump to over $1/minute to Cuba.
 
A 4-port gateway the 9040 comes with 4 FXS ports and costs a MSRP of $1,250 and the 9080 has 8 ports and has a MSRP of $1,950. A separate server is required for each gateway as well.
 
One of the major benefits of the VoSKY/Skype solution is Skype’s ability to allow VoIP calls to take place regardless of network environment. NAT traversal is less of a problem for Skype than just about another VoIP solution on the market. It is for reasons like this company executives tell me the average sales cycle of a Skype gateway is 30 days as opposed to 90 days for the rest of their product lines.
 
But there is more. You can use these gateways to set up a multisite PBX network but the kicker is you do not need public IP addresses to make this happen. In addition, typical SIP gateways do not allow you to call into them with a soft client. Also, these gateways do not need to be connected point to point; they can be installed in a hub and spoke fashion.
 
Of course no special SIP-aware firewall is needed. As long as the network users can surf the web, Skype should work. You can take advantage of a single numbering plan between offices and have Skype be part of your LCR system.
 
VoSKY calls this concept Skype trunking and the company is careful to not say Skype trunking can replace SIP trunking as the reality is you will likely want both depending on your situation.
 
If you have watched Skype users or even used it yourself and marveled at how it works. You can now put the power of Skype-based IP communications to work for your business. If you are a reseller, here is a great opportunity to sell the low hanging fruit in the VoIP space as customers will see ROI times on the order of months in many cases. The VoSKY solution is certainly one worth watching as it seems to be nicely positioned as the defacto enterprise Skype solution for now.

Nuvoiz: Unified Communications Grows Up

June 19, 2007 1:48 AM | 0 Comments
The interest in unified communications is not slowing down and I can tell from the subscription interest to TMC’s Unified Communications Magazine the future looks very bright for this burgeoning technology.
 
A few months back I wrote about mid-market unified communications and more specifically a company called Nuvoiz which is aiming squarely at this market as it rolls out its UC strategy.
 
The founder of the company Chong-Jim Koh is an energetic and passionate entrepreneur who seems to have the drive to be a player in the space. Of course UC is a wide open market and there will be no lack of competition.
 
To stay a step ahead of the competition, Koh showed me the slick UI of his UC application. If I had to say what it looks like… I would say it is more Skype-like than other solutions I have seen. This by the way is a complement.
 
In addition, the company offers a mobile client which runs on Microsoft Windows Mobile Devices. Using your carrier’s data plan or WiFi you can access your corporate PBX via VoIP. There will be a Blackberry version available soon as well.
 
The Nuvoiz solution allows Caller-ID masking so called parties will see the Caller-ID of your office phone and in addition it allows a single voicemail store, call recording and a host of other features which tie your PBX together with your wireless phone.
 
The UC solution integrates seamlessly with the LDAP directory in your company and as you may expect there is three-digit dialing as part of the package. The system ties in nicely with MS Exchange so your presence is adjusted to busy when you are in a meeting. A really nice feature allows your phone to be set to vibrate mode when you are in a meeting and back to normal when you leave.
 
The system is tagging enabled meaning you can “camp” on a person when they are busy and wait for them to be free. The person being “tagged” can allocate time slots to each person waiting to speak with them. For example you may allocate five minutes per person in the queue.
 
Other unification features allow SMS and e-mail to be in a single store. Voicemail is very iPhone like with on-screen buttons for rewind and fast forward. More interesting features are a GUI to allow easier conferencing and file transfer over a chat session. Furthermore you can screen calls and pull callers out of voicemail if desired.
 
The company believes that personal calls and business calls shouldn’t mix and as such they suggest users sign up for a voice plan for their personal calls and keep the data plan for their enterprise calls.
 
My take on this is Nuvoiz is onto something great but the question we need to ask in the US is how operators will respond. Verizon and other wireless carriers already have outlawed VoIP on their broadband wireless connections and moreover have put restrictions on bandwidth consumed per month. There is even talk of users being shut off for excessive bandwidth usage. See To Verizon, "Unlimited" Means 5 GB for more.
 
To date I haven’t heard of anyone being banned on a wireless data network for using an application like VoIP but if you have verified evidence to the contrary please share..
 
Koh feels that operators need to sell more data plans to augment the reduced voice revenue they are seeing. I agree but that does not mean the wireless carriers will.
 
In addition I believe the challenges of wireless VoIP packet prioritization will have to be worked out. It is relatively easy to prioritize voice packets if a carrier wants to. But do they?
 
I have been on a number of video conferences over broadband wireless connections and am constantly amazed at the quality of the video. The same goes for EVDO-based VoIP quality. Of course the challenge becomes speaking in areas where there is less bandwidth. In my experience using EVDO in cars around the country, there are spots where it is not great but the coverage is still good enough for a phone call on Verizon’s network. This could be a challenge for EVDO VoIP conversations.
 
As I mentioned, Nuvoiz is definitely onto something. The question going forward is whether service providers will see Nuvoiz as good or bad for business. Many of us see this as an obvious win for service providers but that doesn’t mean the carriers will agree. It is my hope Verizon, AT&T and others embrace EVDO-based VoIP and even provide services with prioritization which they can charge for.

Audi R8

June 18, 2007 5:00 PM | 3 Comments

At the UC For The The Trading Floor Conference in NYC we happen to be situated in The Audi Building. Enjoy the shots.


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In NYC for Unified Communications on the Trading Floor

June 18, 2007 4:12 PM | 0 Comments
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.

RingCentral Update

June 18, 2007 3:49 PM | 0 Comments
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.
 

VoIP Killer App From Skype

June 18, 2007 2:45 PM | 0 Comments
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?wink )
 
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.

Borderware's SBC Strategy

June 18, 2007 1:58 PM | 0 Comments
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.

Lifesize

June 18, 2007 9:56 AM | 1 Comment
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.

Shunra

June 18, 2007 6:53 AM | 0 Comments
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.
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