Rich is traveling today and his fellow team members are nice enough to be driving while Rich types away in the back seat at a feverish pace. Currently Rich is on 95 south and has seen much of New Jersey already. He hopes to see another state or two before the trip is over. Traffic has been good except for about 30 minutes of rubber necking on the NJ Turnpike because of an absolutely horrific accident on the other side of the highway.
June 2007 Archives
The IPTV market is forecasted to grow nicely for the foreseeable future and one company in the space who has recently gone public is Espial. As a pure-play provider of IPTV solutions Espial may be positioned nicely to take advantage of the growth in this area.
In order to learn more about Espial’s IPO I contacted Brian Mahony the VP of Marketing at the company to get his feedback. Here is the ensuing the mini-interview.
Why did you decide to go public?
We decided some time ago that this would be the best option for growth financing.
What was the market's perception of your offering?
The stock was up 12% in Friday's first day of trading, so it looks positive.
What will the IPO enable your company to do?
According to the Prospectus, the funds will be used to improve the breadth and depth of our products and to allow us to invest in sales, marketing, and operations to support our growth.
Where will Espial be in 3, 5 years?
I can't predict where Espial will be in 3 or 5 years, but if we at least grow with the IPTV market (growing at about 90% CAGR according to market research firm iSuppli) we should be doing fine. We also want to maintain our status as one of the leading middleware companies in all our major markets (Asia, Americas, EMEA)
What is the future of IPTV?
The future of IPTV is about more than TV but other interactive applications and video-related services. IPTV will take advantage of the unique service, technology, and financial advantages of IP technology to provide a more enhanced service for subscribers and a more cost-effective, scalable, and revenue-generating platform for operators.
The resurgence being seen in the IP communications space has changed or refocused the business models of countless companies. VoIP and video over IP growth seem unabated and there has been record M&A activity in the market as of late. Avaya being purchased by private equity for a premium and Mitel acquiring (latest news) Inter-Tel are just a few examples of companies investing in the growth of enterprise IP communications.
The service provider market too is growing nicely. Smaller carriers are all looking for ways to generate more revenue from their customers and many of these carriers are looking for solutions which afford them maximal flexibility while remaining cost-effective.
Enter Taqua, a softswitch manufacturer who flew high in the glory days of VoIP which I define as roughly 1998-2000. The company was acquired by Tekelec years back and recently spun out to become part of GENBAND. After a few months, Taqua was spun back out of GENBAND and once again became an independent company.
I had a chance to speak with Frederick Reynolds the VP of Marketing and Scott Weidenfeller the CMO of Taqua about how the first few weeks of renewed independence have been at the company.
Believe it or not within this short time, Taqua has already sold some softswitches. In fact Tel West Network Services Corp (news) a nine-year-old CLEC just purchased three additional Tekelec 7000 Switching Systems (formerly T7000 under Tekelec) to support the company’s network expansion in Austin, Dallas, and Houston, TX.
According to Jeff Swickard, President of Tel West Communications, “When we made our decision to go to a facilities-based operation in 2003, we needed a flexible next-generation switch to help establish our core service offering. We chose the T7000 from Taqua because its versatility allowed us to provide a host of innovative service offerings. Four years later, we decided to replace legacy switches with proven network generation technology from Taqua. Our decision to purchase three additional T7000s was an easy decision because of the significant operating cost reductions and the opportunity to offer additional services to support our growing customer base.”
When speaking with the Taqua team they tell me their focus is on the smaller IOCs and CLECs. The tier 2-3 vendors like to work with smaller vendors they tell me. They see this refocusing as Taqua coming back to its roots.
Taqua says they have a slew of new and expansion orders. One of the reasons they think the company is doing so well is their system-on-a-card architecture which support IP, T1, DS3 or basically whatever you need. Frederick says the cards auto-discover and do load sharing seamlessly. In addition, they were pretty proud of the low failure rate of their cards. Five cards were returned last year– not all had failed but this is out of 3,000 cards on the market.
The Taqua team told me the focus at Tekelec was more on signaling, LNP and IMS and the Taqua product line didn’t get the as much attention as it could. What Tekelec did do very well I am told is test and scale the T7000 to ensure it was as robust and as reliable as possible.
Taqua says they are beginning to take market share from MetaSwitch and CopperCom. They feel their solution is best for the markets they serve as they have a true Class 5 replacement-on-a-card as opposed to a softswitch gateway distributed architecture. In other words the Taqua 7000 is more like the Nortel DMS-10 and Siemens DCOs typical rural carriers and CLECs are familiar with. The competition on the other hand has separate softswitches, gateways and signaling gateways making it difficult to diagnose problems which may arise. In addition there is an implicit increase in reliability with a single piece of equipment as opposed to a number of disparate solutions connected to one-another.
The Taqua team explained the competition has been focusing on selling solutions which are adjunct to an existing class 5 switch and this doesn’t solve the problem if your legacy switch is going away. This is an important issue to service providers who are concerned about operational costs and right-to-use fees associated with their current big iron switches.
One last point is, according to the marketing duo, Taqua focuses on TDM and IP while the competition focuses on one or the other.
The complete Taqua product line consists of the Taqua 7000 Switching System, the TIC which is the T1 Interface card, the BIC or Broadband Interface Card, the PIC or Packet Interface Card and finally the LTC or Line Trunk Card.
Taqua’s goal is simple. Focus on the smaller CLEC and IOC and replace legacy switches at a rapid clip. Whether they can take major market share away from the other players in the space remains to be seen but carriers I have been speaking with lately tell me they like Taqua’s solutions and now that the company is independent they are happy to look seriously at their offerings. The question now is how fast can Taqua run with the ball and what will be the response from the other players in the space.
Here are some things to keep you busy this weekend. Some articles in the IP Communications and contact center spaces followed by some events worth registering for. All of these are TMC articles and events btw. Enjoy!
IP Communications News
3. Federal Appeals Court Upholds "FCC" Ruling that VoIP Providers Must Pay into Universal Service Fund
CRM/Customer Interaction News
Online Seminars Worth Considering
- Designing Data Centers that Deliver
- Keeping the Customer First thru Unified Communications
- How to Deliver New Voice Services: Revenue Enhancements for Carriers
- Profitability through Simplicity – VARs Targeting SMBs
- Hosted Contact Center Solutions that Work
- Attracting and Retaining Top-Producing Brokers
- Build Advanced 64-Bit Multi-Core Applications
- Blend technology and design to deliver the Total Caller Experience
- Virtual Call Centers 101: The Road Home
Are you worried about people stealing your WiFi? If you are, be sure to check out this article regarding a window film being used to reduce signal leakage from WiFi networks. Used in the DoD the film also reduces the effects of blasts. And yes, light can pass through.
TMCnet’s Spencer Chin has written a well-researched article on the recent patent dispute between Broadcom and Qualcomm. The International Trade Commission has ruled Qualcomm Corp. cannot import some of its baseband chips into the U.S. because they violate patents owned by semiconductor supplier Broadcom Corp. The ban would effectively bar the import of future 3G phones that use Qualcomm’s baseband chips.
This is pretty scary.
Here is the latest on the acquisition of Inter-Tel.
If you are interested in learning about the benefits of VoIP for your business, please be sure to check out and bookmark the new Business VoIP Global Online Community on TMCnet which is sponsored by Allworx.
Why? Because TMCnet editors will be disseminating news, analysis and opinion which will be critical to your understanding of the IP communications market. TMCnet is the most visited communications site in the world and we have approximately 2 million unique visitors to the site each month.
Thanks to readers like you and sponsors like Allworx, we are able to bring you the freshest content and moreover can help provide the cutting edge information you need when selecting VoIP products and services for your organization or for those you resell to.
I hope you enjoy the Business VoIP Community and come back again and again.
I am pretty excited about the UC for the Trading Floor seminar I will be moderating in a few weeks. The conference has generated lots of interest and is a great launch pad for TMC’s launch of Unified Communications Magazine.
I just had a conference call with many of the panelists below and it seems like there will be some lively discussion ad debate. Hope to see you there.
- Saul Rozinsky, VP Network Engineering, Lehman Brothers
- Jason Scott, VP CIB Technology, Wachovia CIB Capital Markets
- Michael Payne, Business Development Manager, Financial Services, Cisco
- Tony Kleckner, Director & Practice Leader for Financial Services, Avaya
- Ed McDonnell, SVP Sales, IM Trader/Pivor Solutions
Many of you may remember the story of my visit to COMDEX back in 1997 to tell the information technology world TMC was going to launch Internet Telephony Magazine. The typical reaction was confusion and in many cases giggles. At the time, the only products in the space were software allowing PC-to-PC calling and a gateway or two.
In 1997 there wasn’t an industry, just a handful of disjointed products. Over time, the IP telephony space which can now be referred to as IP communications became a real market.
Today, VoIP has not only become a growing market, it is a big reason many companies who sell networking products are experiencing growth. IP communications has gone from being a niche to something the IT market can wrap its arms around and thank for helping to grow sales.
In fact a number of networking companies are taking advantage of widespread IP communications adoption by designing products with VoIP in mind.
Case in point is Foundry Networks who is seeing dramatic growth in their networking business due to the widespread adoption of corporate IP communications. In a candid conversation with Gary Hemminger the Director of Product Marketing for the company, he was ecstatic as he told me how business is doing very well and furthermore the company has even recently redesigned the product line to make it better than ever.
What are some of improvements? Well, according to Gary and Pavel Radda, who handles media relations for, they have pushed price/performance, included dual power supplies and lowered the environmental costs. Can you say going green?
One area of differentiation the company is proud of is PoE support which is built-in to the products at the start. This means you don’t need to forklift later to get PoE later. And we all know how important PoE is in IP communications. If you do choose to upgrade to PoE later you can do so in banks of 24.
Gary’s quote on the matter is “Do not buy networking infrastructure that does not support PoE.” And he has a point. Even if you aren’t deploying IP communications today, why handicap your network?
Need more features? The GS and LS product lines have support for MAC-based VLANs allowing a dumb hub to be connected which subsequently enables different devices to plug in and automatically be connected to different VLANs. Certain segments of the market such as the government, universities and at least one country in Asia seem to especially like this feature.
An interesting approach which Foundry has taken which has proved beneficial is to work with the call managers and phones of other vendors rather than developing their own. A few years back the market told them they should have their own suite of telephony products but now it seems the market has changed course and their decision to be agnostic to telephony vendor has paid off nicely. In fact the company estimates 50% of the phones attached to their networking products are actually from Cisco and Avaya.
As a point of trivia, the company uses a Mitel phone system in their own office.
Foundry Networks has LLDP and CDP built into their products and also support Auto QoS which automatically honors the priority bits being sent by phones. Gary says not every company can take advantage of this feature (especially if you have multiple traffic priority levels) but when you can, it eliminates the need to build an access control list (ACL) which takes time and can introduce human error.
As voice continues to permeate corporate networks, the networking industry has come to grips with the fact that IP communications represents a truly critical application which can help dramatically increase their sales. As the networking market embraces IP communications, we can look forward to more innovation making IP voice and video more secure, easier to configure and manage.
Here is an excellent article from Susan Campbell on the synergies between Google and Apple in their new partnership. The potential for both companies to grow sales is obvious in such a collaboration. Just the YouTube/iTunes synergy alone is worth a great deal.
Now think about Google applications distributed on all iPhones. Gmail, Google Search and everything else. The iPhone’s calendar functionality can even be provided by Google.
The thought of a collaboration between these companies is great news for both and the losers will be other mobile phone makers, Microsoft and Yahoo.
Although Andy is a bit more high-maintenance than me (at least when to comes to hotels) I think his latest post could have easily been called the Road Warrior Bill of Rights.
Here is an interesting story from CNET on Google’s need for more immigrants with H1-B visas. According to the article, some Democrats wonder if Google is doing enough to recruit Americans. The question worth asking is are these Democrats serious?
One of the most ingenious hiring campaigns I have ever seen in the United States comes from Google. This billboard which poses a math question and requires you to know the answer before responding is an example of Google going above and beyond to hire US workers.
This story was even on NPR.ORG… Don’t tell me some Democrats missed it.
Google is spending millions of dollars on recruiting in the US and took the time to testify in Washington on this matter. I would imagine the company has more important things to do than to spend a day in front of our government.
Microsoft also complains there are not enough foreign workers. In fact virtually every technology company complains. What some politicians don’t get is that many Americans choose not to study computer engineering. We have a shortage of engineering talent. It is that simple.
Moreover, Google has an obligation to its shareholders to hire people to fill its open positions. By asking questions relating to the company’s hiring practices, our politicians are actually asking Google if they are not living up to their shareholder responsibility.
The whole situation is scary. You just get the feeling when you read this article that the government of this country is terribly out of touch with reality. If you aren’t going to listen to Google and Microsoft about the need for talent, who do you listen to?
It is a sad day when a farmer in New Mexico has access to all the immigrant labor he or she needs and Google and Microsoft are being starved. In the case of the farmer, the government has done little to stem the tide of illegal immigration. When it comes to companies looking to work within the confines of the system, the government questions their integrity.
Every day the politicians deliberate about whether Microsoft and Google are being disingenuous is another day where American companies look to other countries to hire workers.
Worse, the smaller US technology companies will not even be able to hire talent if this keeps up. And these smaller companies a harder time hiring people in other countries.
Eventually, innovation will suffer.
I leave you with this question… Why do some in our government think the top tech companies in the US are lying to them?
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.
