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Radisys
August 15, 2007
I recently had the opportunity to speak with Ray Adensamer of RadiSys about the evolution of the IP communicationsspace, the company’s application-enabling platforms and more.
RadiSys specializes s in developing open standards building blocks, especially in the ATCA and more recently MicroTCA spaces.
To get some more background the company, read my recent blog entry detailing the company’s success.
Please outline your new corporate initiatives.
RadiSys is a leading provider of application-enabling platforms for next-generation networks. Our Promentum ATCA (AdvancedTCA) family is built around the industry’s first fully integrated 10 Gigabit platform and modular building blocks, with the most recent family addition being our new high-density ATCA-9100 media resource blade. Through our 2006 acquisition of Convedia, RadiSys now also offers a comprehensive product family of Internet Protocol (IP) media server products and technology. Recent developments with the Convedia product family include our new Convedia Software Media Server, which runs on various Linux platforms–including the Promentum ATCA-4300 Compute Module. Our collaborative business approach and product portfolio helps our OEM, systems integrator, and solution provider customers save time-to-market and development costs for their IP product programs and network deployments.
How is IP communications changing your company’s strategy?
RadiSys is celebrating our 20th year of operations this year. While our early success came from supplying TDM-based boards and technology, our engineering teams embraced the trend towards IP-based telecommunications years ago, and our Promentum ATCA products are well positioned for a variety of datapath and control applications in the IP communications network. And our new Convedia media server family was a pure IP-based media processing platform right from the start!
How has SIP changed communications?
SIP has emerged as the defacto standard for signaling in the IP communications world. I can’t even think of any telecommunications equipment vendors who have not adopted SIP as a core element of their IP product strategy. The capabilities and flexibility of SIP are facilitating multi-vendor interoperability between IP communications vendors at a much deeper and broader application development level.
What is the biggest request coming from your customer base?
Our customers are the leading vendors of next-generation networking products and technology. They are continuously looking to accelerate the introduction of new products to market, while reducing risk and development costs. Our customers largely want to focus less on hardware platform development and focus more on value-added differentiation, such as application development, end-to-end solution integration, deployment, and even the ongoing network operation for their service provider customers.
How are you answering their demands?
RadiSys has responded with standards-based application-enabling platforms that pre-integrate our hardware products with 3rd party operating systems, media processing, management, and high-availability software offerings. RadiSys is committed to being a leading supplier for a broader range of the telecommunications platform supply chain, so our customers can then accelerate their own application and solution development lifecycle, lower their R&D costs, and focus their resources on differentiated value-add activities.
What do you think the future of the market is?
One can guess that eventually most communications will involve personalized video capabilities with speech-enabled control commands and ubiquitous presence, but unfortunately these changes will happen slowly due to many factors including pricing of last-mile broadband access, regulatory constraints, and interoperability issues (particularly multi-vendor interoperability between video components). RadiSys continues to forecast a growing demand for more processing power and capabilities in the core of the network to deliver these capabilities. We also envision a future where RadiSys may someday take full responsibility for all of the hardware and systems software for our customer’s network equipment product portfolio.
How does the US growth rate in the US compare to the rest of the world?
RadiSys is a global company. While the US will continue to be the leaders in telecommunications technology innovation, we believe the regions outside the US, particularly China and other Asian countries, will continue to be the leaders in telecommunications technology adoption.
What do you think of Google and Apple entering the telecom market?
Google and Apple are both innovative companies which have and will continue to introduce fresh new ideas into next-generation communication services. However, my opinion is that they also view telecom as the conduit between their desktops and devices, and their centralized information, application, and media servers. It is important for incumbent telecommunication service providers to continue to leverage the ownership of their subscriber relationships. Through building open, yet secure service delivery architectures like IMS, service providers can provide the retail storefront for 3rd party application developers, and maintain ownership of the customer relationship through service bundling and customer service, instead of having these same application developers completely bypass the value-add of the network.
How about Microsoft?
Microsoft’s entry into the telecommunications industry is also a good thing. Microsoft's involvement in PCs and IT has benefited all users through ubiquitous, inexpensive, and standardized computing. We have no doubt that Microsoft has the capabilities and resources to deliver many innovations to telecommunication services as well.
How will wireless technologies change our market?
Mobility makes it easier for users to stay in touch and increase their overall usage of telecom services. Users have a huge pent-up demand for broadband mobility services, but continue to be price sensitive to the current cost of mobile broadband access. As the subscriber cost of mobile broadband decreases, adoption of mobile broadband services will grow dramatically.
How will communications evolve over the next five years?
Telecommunication evolution over the next five years will not be as disruptive as the past five years of IP communications. Instead, vendors and service providers will focus on refining reliability, security, and interoperability around many of the services that are already envisioned and understood today. IMS, video, speech, and collaboration (including conferencing) will all continue to grow. We also expect to see more features wrapped around presence, such as presence-based conferencing. Progress will be made in some of the key challenges in IP communications technology, such as honoring quality of service (QoS) and SLAs across IP peer-network boundaries, VoIP security, and true multi-vendor video communication interoperability. ATCA will become a prominent platform standard within carrier networks, and the only unique telecom hardware being built will be for bleeding edge products that are pushing technology.
What sorts of things will we be hearing about during your presentation at ITEXPO?
The industry continues to hear lots about convergence in the context of end-user experiences, such as service convergence or fixed/mobile convergence. While convergence from the user’s point of view is the key goal to improving telecommunications experiences, achieving operational efficiencies and cost savings requires convergence in the core service delivery architecture as well. RadiSys presentations at IT Expo will discuss the merits and benefits for converged, standards-based platforms and capabilities in IMS service delivery architectures.
Why is your presentation a “Can’t Miss?”
OEMs, systems integrators, and solution developers working on IP communication solutions will learn more about the strategies and benefits behind ATCA-based application enabling technology.
What do you want the industry to know about your company?
RadiSys this year is celebrating 20 years of technical leadership and innovation in embedded systems for telecom and commercial markets. Our company continues to make substantial investments in our ATCA platform integration capabilities. RadiSys is also a well-financed public company with a strong balance sheet that will be around for the long haul.
Please make one surprising prediction we will see in 5 years.
This is maybe more of a wish then a prediction, but my vision is that telecommunications collaboration technology will become so ubiquitous and easy to use that virtual meeting rooms and video conferencing will become as productive as face-to-face meetings, resulting in a downward trend in the frequency of business travel.
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Packet Island
August 15, 2007
I recently had the opportunity to ask Packet Island President Praveen Kumar about VoIP, the IP Communications space and more.
Packet Island provides the a micro-appliance based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution that enables service providers and VARs to deliver managed IT services like VoIP lifecycle management at disruptive price points.
To get some history on the company, be sure to read this blog entry I wrote earlier this year about how the company has redefined network management.
What pains does your company solve for customers?
We enable service providers and VARs to design solid converged media networks for the SMB market. Our solution solves the quality problem that has been hobbling the VoIP industry.
How has SIP changed communications?
SIP has been a boon for SMB customers because it has commoditized the VoIP equipment market. Now that SIP interoperability issues are gradually going away, the next phase of the industry will see a variety of SIP-based advanced communication and collaboration services becoming available to the SMB mass market.
How do you think the future of the market looks?
The future looks very exciting. Several key market events in the past year (e.g. Microsoft making a major push into VoIP) promise to take VoIP deeper into the business market. Many hosted service providers are also figuring out that telecom is more about service quality and less about cost. Many of the cost-based business VoIP providers are dropping dead. The ones left standing will build very successful businesses.
How about Microsoft?
The reality of how this will play out remains to be seen. Microsoft has some big partners (e.g Nortel) they have to dance with. I suspect that Microsoft will go after the mid to large end of the market. They will likely compete aggressively with Cisco - it will be interesting to watch.
The low end will still be dominated by open source Asterisk. It is possible that some of the big Microsoft rivals may embrace open source asterisk to setup a barrier.
How will open source technologies change our market?
Open source has already commoditized the SMB VoIP market. Asterisk has found a strong foothold in the small business side of the enterprise market. They will continue to move up-market and bring about great innovations that will bring true seamless collaboration to the mass market.
What are your thoughts regarding hosted solutions?
Hosted solutions have been struggling for the past few years because of Internet quality issues. Many of those problems are being resolved now as hosted VoIP providers are putting in comprehensive processes to ensure end-to-end quality. The next 2-3 years will see nice growth in this market.
What do you want the industry to know about your company?
At Packet Island, we have built what we consider to be the Next-Gen HP Openview platform. While traditional network management solutions use SNMP polling to monitor the health of networks, the Packet Island solution uses deep packet inspection using inexpensive micro-appliances to enable the centralized management of highly distributed converged media networks.
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Dialexia
August 15, 2007
I recently had the opportunity to ask Mohamed El Mohri, CTO at Dialexia Communications, about the evolution of the IP communicationsspace and the direction his company is taking.
Dialexia Communications is best known for its next generation communication software and services. The company develops and markets a complete suite of IP-Telephony software and applications. It also provides advanced IP communications solutions to enterprises, service providers as well as resellers.
Please outline your new corporate initiatives.
For the next few years, Dialexia’s new initiatives will turn around the IMS architecture, core technologies, and services.
Our current products will migrate to IMS-readiness. The main outcome is expected to be more sophisticated and attractive IP communications services that will be able to run on various IP and legacy networks agnostically of the underlying access technology.
How is IP communications changing your company’s strategy?
Since Dialexia is an IP communications software company, it is obvious that the business strategy is dramatically affected by the IP-based technologies’ evolvement. This mainly translates in creation and deployment of new IP communications services. Further, Dialexia uses its own IP communications products as corporate communication system.
This has the effect to bring to Dialexia the same advantages as to customers, chief among them remote working, which enables some distant employees and collaborators to remain in touch with their colleagues and share information and documents.
What pains does your company solve for customers?
The same as the IP communications technology does: low prices, high administration and usage flexibility, elaborated services, easy installation and deployment. We make our products affordable so that even the smallest start-ups are able to switch to VoIP and get into the market.
From a support and customer management perspective, Dialexia is able to provide enhanced services including IP Centrex, Pre-paid Cards, Call Shop service, resulting in high retention rates and a return on their investment in less than six months. The Dialexia platforms also offers a SOAP/XML APIs that has enabled ITSPs to provide an automated customer signup process from registration to activation without manual intervention.
How has SIP changed communications?
Nowadays, SIP has become the de facto IP communications signaling protocol. The changes it brought to communications are substantially those of the IP technology: service creation flexibility, wide range of access technologies, new services, unified communications, network convergence, etc.
How do you think the future of the market looks?
I think the future market will be portrayed by network convergence, service and application combination, universal accessibility, and universal mobility. These concepts are actually the target of the IMS standard.
How does the growth rate in the US compare to the rest of the world?
VoIP is better adopted in the US then in the rest of the world, we are still facing regulation authorities in some countries banning VoIP or licensing it at a very high price.
Another factor of growth is based on Bandwidth Price, if the xDSL, Wireless and Cable broadband lower in price the demand will grow and usage of IP device will augment.
What do you think of Google and Apple entering the telecom market?
They will grab a lot of shares in the residential market only. Although these are giant corporations their entry into the telecom market will not pose a big threat on existing companies who have been able to provide their customers more than satisfactory telecom solutions. They might just be able to reach out to new customers who haven’t tried VoIP yet since they already trust these large corporations and know them well.
How about Microsoft?
Microsoft will play a big role in the enterprise level but none at the Service Providers level. Their OCS will enable the recalcitrant enterprise decision makers to migrate to VoIP. Its ability to integrate Internet Telephony into its current products allows it a good chance to grasp those customers that have still not switched to using VoIP solutions.
It will pave the way to new type of applications and services for desktop users, like integration to exchange Server, CRM and other type of collaboration services.
How will open source technologies change our market?
Open Source is free but not cheap, it takes more resources to. It is too risky to deploy Open source VoIP application in a Class 4/5 type of services where high availability and scalability is a must.
Open Source is a good tool to learn about the technology or to start a small business.
What are your thoughts regarding hosted solutions?
Delegation is always attractive. Hosting is the fastest way to try a new technology, the investment is low and Return of Investment is fast. Easy to upgrade for new services without investing on new equipments.
How will communications evolve over the next five years?
The combination of WiMax and IMS are the next five years’ driver. Cellular, Cable TV and other type of Communications services will evolve to IP.
What will the industry see at your booth at ITEXPO?
A new look of IP-Centrex and Conference Server.
Why is your booth a “Can’t Miss?”
Conference Server
What do you want the industry to know about your company?
A young talented brilliant Team with always new ideas. A company that was born with SIP, believes in it and grows with it.
What’s next for communications?
We don’t say triple-play, quadruple-play communications but ALL-PLAY communications.
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Telrex
August 15, 2007
I recently got the chance to sit down with Bob Cordes, Vice President of Product Management for Telrex. We discussed his company’s business strategy, as well as the future of the IP telephony market in general.
Telrex is a leading provider of IP call recording and contact center optimization solutions. Their CallRex platform provides easy and affordable software solutions for companies of all sizes to protect, grow and optimize their business. Telrex offers premise-based solutions for SMB and enterprise, and hosted solutions for service providers. Read more about their hosted solutions in this article previously posted on TMCnet.
Please outline your new corporate initiatives.
At Telrex, we continue to add solutions for quality monitoring and contact center optimization, leveraging our CallRex platform for IP call recording and multi-media recording in IP telephony and UC environments.
How is IP communications changing your company’s strategy?
We have been committed to IP telephony from the start, so the market is validating our strategy.
How has SIP changed communications?
SIP enables CallRex to deliver IP call recording to a wider range of IP telephony systems. It does make supporting different systems easier, though a high level of complexity remains across platforms, as various flavors of SIP extensions are implemented by IP telephony vendors.
What is the biggest request coming from your customer base?
Open platform for extensibility, integration with business applications and scalability. Telrex has responded by re-architecting the system earlier this year to deliver a services-oriented software architecture that delivers enterprise-class scalability across multiple locations. We also released our latest—a client-side API that provides full access to all of the core functionality of the CallRex recording and monitoring platform. We provide the API free of charge. We find that many of our VAR partners have development resources on staff. Additionally, with our Microsoft LCS and OCS integrations, our API is attracting a wider range of partners. In fact, the CallRex interface is developed on top of our API, so the API is very robust and well-supported.
What do you think is the future of the market?
Call recording and monitoring is quickly becoming an industry-standard application. We are seeing organizations of all sizes deploying recording and monitoring solutions to protect their business. This means recording calls for regulatory compliance, dispute resolution, increased security and employee productivity. Protecting the business is a driving factor. For instance, by deploying call recording for dispute resolution, our customers find they actually avoid disputes altogether because they have an objective record of what was discussed on the phone. It enables them to drive stronger relationships with their good customers, and it can save a lot of money for the business in finding better ways to address issues.
Going forward, many companies are now recognizing that by recording interactions with their customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders, they are creating an asset for the business that should be leveraged as a valuable resource. Growing the business is becoming a new driving factor for IP call recording and monitoring solutions.
This is not just for companies running formal call centers; rather it’s for every business that has one or more teams of people doing business over the phone every day. These people may be sales representatives or account managers, insurance claims adjustors, or any other type of employee that is highly trained, is expected to follow specific policies and procedures, and is in a position to impact the business. We find customers are leveraging our quality monitoring solutions to evaluate their call recording assets to find new ways of growing the business and operating more efficiently. This includes accelerating training by more quickly and objectively evaluating employee performance, understanding why customers are calling in order to increase first call resolution, capturing the “voice of the customer” to understand the customer experience, streamlining business processes, and identifying ways to increase the value of transactions. We are pleased to see many companies beginning to realize that they are creating a valuable asset by recording interactions. So growth is occurring among businesses with what we have termed “informal contact centers”.
How does the growth rate in the US compare to the rest of the world?
We find IP call recording to follow the growth of IP telephony. Penetration has been highest in the US, with APAC and EMEA second, while we find our LAT or CALA regions are leap-frogging technologies to provide significant growth opportunities.
What do you think of Google and Apple entering the telecom market?
Telrex has been committed to IP Telephony from the start. It has always been a fast moving and exciting market, and we look forward to Google and Apple driving additional innovation.
How about Microsoft?
Microsoft is helping to drive an inflection point for IP communications. Telrex partners with Microsoft and supports their initiatives.
How will wireless technologies change our market?
The infrastructure requirements to record and monitor customer interactions from an ever-increasing mobile workforce will continue to drive the need for all-software IP-based solutions. The market trends favor the approach Telrex has taken from the beginning.
What makes your upcoming ITEXPO presentation a “Can’t Miss?”
Attendees should come to hear about the fastest growing industry-standard business application – IP call recording and monitoring. It offers all types of companies an easy and affordable way to protect, grow and optimize the business in ways never before possible. IP call recording is an excellent example of a solution that fulfills the promise of IP telephony – the idea that communications will evolve from expensive, complex and proprietary hardware systems into software applications running on a data network that are affordable, easy and open.
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3CX
August 15, 2007
I recently had the opportunity to ask 3CX CEO Nick Galea about the evolution of the IP communicationsspace and the direction his company is taking.
3CX is well known for its SIP-based 3CX Phone System for Windows, a software-based IP PBX that replaces a traditional proprietary hardware PBX/PABX.
To learn more about the company, read this TMCnet article from earlier this year.
Please outline your new corporate initiatives.
We have launched version 3.1 of our phone system recently, which is a complete software based small business phone system running on Windows. Our main drive for Q4 of this year is the release of version 4, which will include a SIP VOIP client and have many innovations.
How is IP communications changing your company's strategy?
Our company is based on the future potential on IP Communications, so it’s pretty fundamental to our company strategy.
What pains does your company solve for customers?
The pain of the traditional proprietary phone system shackle. It is expensive, difficult to manage and entirely outdated. We remove that shackle-bind by liberating the PBX from the proprietary hardware. As software running on Windows, it is much more flexible and can finally integrate with the Windows business applications we use each day and takes IP Telephony to an entirely new level.
How has SIP changed communications?
I think SIP is the main driver in the acceleration of the IP Telephony revolution. I think the standard will continue to gain power and soon enough it will beat and hopefully eliminate the proprietary SKYPE protocol. Once that is done I think the telecom revolution will accelerate even more.
How do you think the future of the market looks?
SIP based. Open standards with best of breed solutions for software, hardware, add ons and so on.
How does the growth rate in the U.S. compare to the rest of the world?
I think IP Telephony is growing everywhere. I don't think it's particularly any different in the U.S. For example, we are seeing rapid VOIP take up in France and Italy.
What do you think of Google and Apple entering the telecom market?
They are much welcomed but let’s evaluate their products on the strength of the actual product, not just on the fact that there is a big name behind it. So far there is Google Talk and Apple iPhone. Google talk still has a long way to go and doesn't seem to be going anywhere fast. Apple iPhone has a great coolness factor but other then that it does pretty much the same as what mobile phones have been doing for years.
How about Microsoft?
What about them? :-) Microsoft Response Point is nowhere to be seen, and Microsoft Office Communications Server is touted as the next VOIP platform though it doesn't even have elementary PBX switching in it.
How will open source technologies change our market?
I don't think open source technologies are changing the market. I think the emergence of standards such as SIP are changing the market. The open source principle has some major flaws. It assumes that companies want to get into the source code of products, which is generally not what they wish to do.
Open source does not encourage long term investment in a code base, something that is required to build stable and mature products. If you draw an analogy to political movements, then open source is like communism (free for all - kind of) and closed source is the free market principle with investment offering long term rewards. I think it’s quite clear that the latter is what is required. Closed source with substantial investment and long term commitment. This will lead to IP Telephony platforms that will help businesses increase mobility and productivity.
What are your thoughts regarding hosted solutions?
They will have a place in the market, but considering the fact that most companies still host their own mail server it’s quite easy to see that companies hosting phone systems remotely is a long way away.
How will communications evolve over the next five years?
Mobility. Mobility. Mobility. Anything that can provide that will do well, anything that won't – wont.
What will the industry see at your booth at ITEXPO?
3CX Phone System for Windows -- a revolutionary product from a manageability perspective.
Why is your booth a "Can't Miss?"
It is for all those companies wanting to do IP Telephony, but who want easy installation, configuration and management, and is therefore not Linux.
What do you want the industry to know about your company?
That we intend to take the lion share of the SMB phone system market by providing a quality, low cost and innovative telephony platform on Windows.
What's next for communications?
Mobility. Mobility. Mobility. Anything that can provide that will do well, anything that won’t – wont.
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The State of Telecom Competition
August 15, 2007
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a great story on telecom competition. It is worth a read if you want to understand the plight of CLECs and the industry in general.
Here is an excerpt:
Greensburg-based Remi Communications, which competes with Verizon in both the Pittsburgh and Philadelphia markets, could end up being charged more to access the delivery lines than it would if it signed up for Verizon's services as a regular customer, said David Malfara, company CEO. "That's above retail rates," he said.
Higher prices would reduce not only competition, but also, possibly, the incentive and money available for improving broadband access. That's because companies that rent the copper lines from Verizon provide not just telephone service, but they also soup up the lines with their own equipment in order to offer broadband Internet and video services.
There is precedence for the exemptions. Verizon requested, and received, FCC "forbearance" relief from state and federal laws regulating high-capacity voice and data services. (That ruling was challenged by competitors in the U.S. Court of Appeals.) After that 2006 decision, AT&T, Qwest Communications and BellSouth Corp. filed for similar relief -- lifting regional, market-specific price caps.
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Telecom Cost Management
August 15, 2007
One of the fastest areas of growth in communications – and there seem to be so many these days, is telecom cost management. In recognition of this fact, TMC has launched a Telecom Cost Management channel which is being sponsored by Optelcon.
Why is telecom cost management an important area? PSTN calls, VoIP calls, FMC, wireless calls, broadband communications, etc have made it challenging to understand phone bills, let alone manage the cost of them.
What sorts of articles might we see on this micro-community? Boy am I glad you asked.
Here is a list of some of the latest content on the site:
- Tackling the Communications Expense Beast with Telecom Cost Management
- Eliminate Unneeded Telecom Expenses, Save Money
- Optelcon Teams with Ernest Communications on Telecom Cost Management for Mobile Spend
- Why Companies Spend More on Mobile Costs Than They Should
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UK Trains Get Free WiFi
August 15, 2007
Living on the east coast of the US I am lucky to have access to a rail system which is not the best in the world but definitely acceptable. As a side note I took a Metro North train to Westchester and was pretty surprised how the cars on the Westchester line are so much nicer than those going to Fairfield County. Surprisingly Metro North also runs the trains to TMC’s home city of South Norwalk which is located within the county of Fairfield.
But I digress. For US citizens looking for yet another thing to envy about the rail systems in other countries… Today I learned that you will receive free WiFi on trains going from London to Scotland. Here is more from the New York Times (registration required).
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TransNexus
August 15, 2007
I recently had the opportunity to ask Jim Dalton of TransNexus about his business and the direction he is taking the company. As you may recall, I was on a VoIP peering panel with Jim over a year ago.
TransNexus provides Operations and Billing Support (OSS/BSS) software platforms for VoIP Peering and network interconnect management.
How is IP communications changing your company’s strategy?
TransNexus was founded in 1997 to provide VoIP interconnect and settlement solutions. IP communications is the basis for our existence and has not changed our strategy.
How has SIP changed communications?
SIP applications are easier to develop than H.323. Therefore there are a lot of inexpensive SIP devices and plenty of competition.
What is the biggest request coming from your customer base?
The need to simplify operations and eliminate costs.
How are you answering their demands?
More automation, more intuitive interfaces and more tools for optimizing profits from the network.
What do you think of Google and Apple entering the telecom market?
This is good for companies that are challenging the traditional telecom model before telcos. We think it will be good for TransNexus since our business is focused on managing VoIP interconnects. Telco consolidation is bad for TransNexus while new and different VoIP entrants are good for our business.
How about Microsoft?
The same as above. Microsoft creates terror in the market for PC applications, but I think they will be just another competitor in the VoIP market.
How will wireless technologies change our market?
I am praying for third option to provide broadband to homes and businesses.
How will communications evolve over the next five years?
I do not know, but the change will be big.
What sorts of things will we be hearing about during your presentation at ITEXPO?
Carrier Interconnect and VoIP peering.
Why is your presentation a “Can’t Miss?”
Most folks do not understand PSTN interconnect policy set by the FCC.PSTN interconnect policy is unraveling, but there is not clear free market alternative. My presentation will look at the issues.
What do you want the industry to know about your company?
TransNexus software, with Public Key Infrastructure technology enables secure peer to peer interconnection among VoIP carriers without a session border controller - saving capital and expense.
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Aperio CI Interview
August 15, 2007
I recently had the opportunity to speak with William Mich, chairman and chief executive officer of Aperio CI, and get his thoughts on where the market and his company is headed.
As you may recall, the company has a unique way of generating more revenue for service providers and moreover can reduce churn while increasing ARPU.
To get some history on the company, be sure to read this article I wrote last year about how Aperio CI can help service providers generate more revenue.
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Please outline your new corporate initiatives.
Aperio CI is focusing on helping service providers better understand the propensities and behaviors of their customers, which ultimately will enable them to deliver more targeted and compelling offers that result in longer customer lifecycles, enhanced brand loyalty and greater profitability.
How is IP communications changing your company’s strategy?
IP communications gives providers many more options in terms of delivering value-added content. As a result, our company has become more refined in mapping customer attributes to help providers deliver the right offer to the right customer at the right time.
What is the biggest request coming from your customer base?
Finding solutions to reduce churn and build brand loyalty.
How are you answering their demands?
We have developed a comprehensive suite of technologies to help customers understand the attributes of both desirable and less than desirable customers, and customize offers that will motivate good customers to stay with the brand.
What do you think the future of the market is?
We are extremely optimistic that providers will pay equal -- if not more -- attention to retention. Savvy providers understand that keeping good customers is much more profitable and operationally sound than having to acquire a significant base each year.
How does the US growth rate in the U.S. compare to the rest of the world?
European wireless adoption rates, particularly for data services, far surpass the U.S. market but the U.S. is catching up.
How will communications evolve over the next five years?
Transport infrastructure will become completely commoditized much like in today’s fixed line voice market. The real differentiator will become the applications and services that are delivered to the user. The challenge for providers is to make the right service available to the right customer for the right price, instead of the traditional mindset of force-feeding technology. Providers will need to become much more attuned to their customers’ wants in order to satisfy their thirst for content.
What sorts of things will we be hearing about during your presentation at ITEXPO?
One of the big mysteries in the CRM space is the concern around the low adoption rates of Web-based self-service solutions. Our session will attempt to provide some insight into why these tools have not been more readily accepted by users. We’ll also offer some suggestions on how service providers can make their self-service portals more responsive to customer needs.
Why is your presentation a “Can’t Miss?”
Businesses in a variety of industries have spent huge sums of money promoting Web-based self-service tools, but usage is relatively low. Our thought is that while technology may be impressive, it doesn’t mean anything if customers find it cumbersome or unreliable. Our mission is to allow providers to see their solutions from the perspective of their users, and then determine if they are realistically meeting their expectations through the use of these tools.
What do you want the industry to know about your company?
Aperio CI is committed to giving service providers a thorough and complete understanding of how customers use their services, where their strengths and weaknesses are and how they can protect good customers from competition. Our solutions are based on comprehensive data analytics and thorough analysis of comparative service offers, combined with years of mapping and modeling customer behavior. Aperio CI’s clients use this data to better understand the drivers of each customer, and make more targeted and relevant retention and acquisition offers.
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Smoothstone
August 15, 2007
I recently had the opportunity to ask Jeff Wellemeyer, chairman and CTO of Smoothstone, about the most recent call center solutions and the path Smoothstone is taking to create greater customer satisfaction.
Smoothstone is an IP communications provider that designs, integrates and services specifically tailored solutions including VoIP for medium-sized enterprises. The company’s IP communications platform provides next generation, centrally managed and enterprise strength solutions over a private nationwide network.
Please read more coverage of Smoothstone in TMCnet.
Please outline your new corporate initiatives.
Smoothstone continues to add new clients and to introduce new services. The most recent initiative is the introduction of our new Smoothstone Intelligent Call Control (ICC) platform. This completely integrated solution changes the face of ACD technology by providing advanced features previously available in only the most sophisticated systems. ICC’s unmatched flexibility — combined with its centralized delivery model — creates a unique, highly survivable, infinitely scalable and enterprise class call center solution. As a network-delivered service, ICC is now available to any organization, regardless of its size. Because ICC does not require customers to purchase equipment, it is priced according to our client’s organization size and can be customized to fit each organization’s individual needs. ICC can interface with customer IP phone handsets or a Cisco CallManager on a client’s premises.
How is IP communications changing your company’s strategy?
Providing completely managed IP Communication solutions to mid-sized enterprises is all Smoothstone does and all we have ever done since our founding in 2000. Included in our offerings is a completely managed and fully hosted call director/queuing/monitoring/recording platform — dubbed Smoothstone Intelligent Call Control — that brings sophisticated and powerful call center functionality to mid-sized enterprises that previously didn’t have access to such powerful tools and applications. This has proven to be a very good strategy for us, as our revenues have doubled every year and over 99 percent of the clients we have ever had are still Smoothstone clients.
How has SIP changed communications?
SIP has been a major enabler of IP communications. However, for SmoothstoneCOMPLETE — our fully hosted, completely managed solution — we use SCCP. SCCP is a proprietary terminal control protocol originally developed by Selsius Corporation. It is now owned and defined by Cisco. Smoothstone uses it as a messaging set between our private, nationwide network and Cisco 7900 series IP phones. We also have private label IPBlue soft phones that use SCCP for signaling. Conversely, for our SmoothstoneCONNECT product, which provides IP trunking of voice services to on premise IP and TDM PBX-based systems, we use SIP as the signaling protocol.
What is the biggest request coming from your customer base?
The demand from our clients for Smoothstone Intelligent Call Control has been tremendous. However, while our clients appreciate the business transforming value of this new functionality their biggest request, and conversely the area on which we focus most intently, is the service behind all of our solutions. Bottom line, they want their communication solutions to work flawlessly, every time. When they have an issue, they want the attention of a live person that will resolve the issue satisfactorily and quickly. At the heart of the relationship between Smoothstone and its clients is one simple word: trust. Because we become the single source for all of our clients’ communications needs (equipment, carrier services, tools, applications, professional advice), they must believe that they have placed these business “mission critical” needs in hands they can trust.
How are you answering their demands?
We do so every day, through our relentless and never ending 24/7/365 focus on client service. Our network operations center is continuously staffed with Cisco certified engineers who personally answer incoming calls from clients. They then either solve the issues during the initial calls themselves or escalate them to the proper Smoothstone resource so they can solve the issue. We also have ACD customization consultants on staff that help our clients configure and then continuously optimize their organization’s call flows, using Smoothstone Intelligent Call Control.
What do you think the future of the market is?
We see three trends colliding: The continued rise of outsourcing non-strategic business functions; the convergence of all communications onto one IP-based network; and the shift to software delivered as a service including call center functionality that was previously only on client premises. We have named the combination of these three trends “Converged Communications as a Service” (CCaaS). In a nutshell, we see all communication services and communication management applications eventually being as services over the network to various endpoint devices but without any other infrastructure on a client’s premises. We see the services themselves all delivered over the network. This means the communication services, tools and applications delivery markets will consolidate to three types of players: network providers; endpoint manufacturers; and companies that provide services, tools and applications over the network to the endpoint devices.
How does the growth rate in the U.S. compare to the rest of the world?
We see the adoption of IP communications, particularly hosted IP communications, happening faster in the U.S. than in the rest of the world, but the rest of the world isn’t far behind. The adoption of Converged Communications as a Service is just now emerging as the dominant delivery model in the U.S. but it will soon spread around the globe.
What do you think of Google and Apple entering the telecom market?
Apple has entered as a supplier of mobile endpoint devices. Apple’s innovativeness will be good for that market because it will drive other competitors to be more innovative and thus improve endpoint devices overall. Google’s current aspirations in the telecom market aren’t yet clear, although they have the potential to introduce some interesting new services and applications, perhaps not in the call center space directly but certainly in support of it. However, we don’t see them competing directly in Smoothstone’s space (at least for now), which is enterprise class IP communications over a nationwide, private, IP over MPLS network.
How about Microsoft?
Microsoft could be a formal competitor in the “software that drives IP communications” market, just as they came to dominate much of the “software that drives e-mail” market.” This could very well include call center control and management software. We are watching them closely, so that we can incorporate their innovations into the delivery of Smoothstone’s services if it makes sense for us to do so. The coming clash between Microsoft and Cisco in the “software that drives IP communications” market should be very interesting. And, like Apple’s entry into the mobile endpoint device market, this competition will increase innovation throughout the market and be good for the market overall.
How will wireless technologies change our market?
Wireless networks and wireless endpoint devices are becoming increasingly important components of the overall network and variety of endpoint devices over which Smoothstone must deliver its services. That said, for QoS and ease of complete, end-to-end management reasons, we see wired networks and endpoint devices remaining important platforms for our services for the foreseeable future.
How will communications evolve over the next five years?
The three trends we identified (outsourcing, convergence, SaaS) will continue to exert more and more influence on the enterprise class communications market and on the call center management market within this overall market. We see Converged Communications as a Service (CCaaS) continuing to grow as the preferred alternative to traditional, on premise hardware and software-based communications and call center control systems, in much the same way SaaS is transforming the software industry.
What sorts of things will we be hearing about during your presentation at ITEXPO?
Simply put, outsourcing, convergence and SaaS have come to the communications industry and, as a result, the industry is beginning to go through a major transformation and will never be as it was. During our presentation, the audience will hear: Smoothstone’s rational for this conclusion, how we see these trends shaping the industry, and “how it works” technically to come away with a good understanding of the opportunities and challenges presented by SaaS, as well as by convergence and outsourcing. Our presentation will include how outsourcing/convergence/SaaS will transform the call center control systems market within the overall business communications services market.
Why is your presentation a “Can’t Miss?”
Smoothstone is literally the only provider of completely managed IP communications to the mid-sized enterprise. We are taking the CCaaS business model to clients who are much larger and who have much more sophisticated communications needs than any of the other, so-called “hosted IP communications” providers in the market today. With the introduction of Smoothstone Intelligent Call Control, we have made large enterprise class, sophisticated call center control functionality available to the mid-sized enterprise, including many for whom this level and type of functionality was previously out of reach, for either internal expertise or financial reasons.
What do you want the industry to know about your company?
We simply want the industry to know about our company, our unique CCaaS-based delivery of completely managed IP communication solutions, and Smoothstone Intelligent Call Control.
Please make one surprising prediction we will see in 5 years.
Many “hosted” IP PBX providers are predicting that the on premise IP PBX is dead. We agree and, in fact, we’ve been predicting this longer than anyone else! However, we also predict that the same thing is going to happen to on premise hardware and software that delivers call center functionality — it is, or will soon be, DEAD – replaced by network delivered call center functionality, like Smoothstone Intelligent Call Control.
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TMCnet New Traffic Record
August 15, 2007
Thanks to all our readers and visitors who have allowed TMCnet to achieve a new traffic record in July 2007.
Here are the numbers:
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Page Views
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30,977,147
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Average Visit Length
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35:45
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Unique Visitors
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3,078,409
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Page Views refers to actual pages viewed. So if you look at three articles a month on TMCnet you represent 3 page views. Our prior average was 20 million.
30,977,147 represents a 50+% increase over the prior record.
Average Visit Length represents how much time a person spends on the site
Unique Visitors represents how many unique viewers came to TMCnet in the entire month.
Thank you also to the TMC team for continuing to produce content our audience finds compelling.
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