Looks like Dan York has the same problem with “Skypee” that I had. Dan, don’t you know you need to turn off the “Skypee” to get to the internet? Seriously – if you travel you should read Dan’s post and mine as well.
September 2007 Archives
Emerson recently picked up the embedded computing division from Motorola. This is a good move for Motorola as the company can put more of their focus on handsets and other core areas of their business. Right now Nokia and Apple are major threats and one less distraction always helps.I am very impressed with the Motorola embedded team and the Emerson team (although I haven’t known this group for very long). Here is an article I wrote about Emerson Network Power a few months back.
I always felt the embedded team was lost at Motorola -- a small division with lots of potential that couldn’t get the corporate parent’s attention.
If Emerson can continue their increased branding and awareness and stronger PR push while not losing their technological edge and great engineering team, this acquisition will be good for all parties involved.
This was a big week for me personally as I switched service providers. I should mention I have free VoIP accounts coming out of my ears. I often test them but I haven’t switched to any of them because to be quite honest, what I have works fine. I have been using AT&T CallVantage for years and the service has been great. I do have occasional hiccups when I upload massive quantities of photos but otherwise the service is bulletproof.As I live in an area which is supplied by Cablevision, I have been using their Optimum Online service for as long as I can remember. Recently however I have been experiencing lost packets. I wrote about the problem back in June.
I have a cable modem from Cablevision which feeds into an ATA from AT&T and this feeds into a Linksys AP which supplies WiFi. Somewhere along the line there were lost packets. When I called Cablevision they said they could not verify the lost packets. So I did not know if there was a service or equipment problem. If it was equipment, I didn’t know which piece of equipment to eliminate.
A few nights back my wife was on the phone with Cablevision and they asked if she wanted to switch phone service. She handed me the phone and I said yes.
I had been meaning to call and switch for a few months but had no time. In my estimation, unless I wanted to start doing network troubleshooting myself, I had no choice but to switch to Cablevision so I had a single throat to choke.
The customer service representative started selling me by explaining that I don’t need to worry about financial problems with their company unlike SunRocket and Vonage. He was quite knowledgeable about the market. I was pretty amazed. He knew some of the Vonage patent issues and could speak to them intelligently.
The cost for the service is $15/month and the rep as I recall said this is a lot less than “AT&T is robbing me for.” While this sounds pretty classless in writing, on the phone it came across better. I thought the rep was a keeper but could use a bit of polishing.
He asked if I wanted LNP and I did. The cost surprised me as it is a one time fee of $40 to keep my phone number. I think I pay AT&T about $30+ a month so I will save money within a few months.
What did annoy me about the call is that I didn’t qualify for the best plan because I am an Optimum double-play customer as I have cable TV service as well. Since I am a double-play customer I am not eligible for as good a deal as a single-play customer. This is pretty annoying to me and is not making me happy.
But to be honest I just want phone and internet service that works.
What is amazing about this story is the phone companies are suing Vonage out of existence and it seems the cable companies (at least Cablevision) is doing the best job of taking advantage of it.
In addition the cable companies are in a great position because any time you call them to change or order anything, they try to sell you something. They have free advertising on their TV networks and they have incoming calls of potential customers which are also free.
This is quite an advantage for Cablevision and others.
I ran into a high-level ex-Vonage employee yesterday and got into a conversation with him and someone who runs a company supplying Vonage with a service. I won’t give more details to protect the innocent.
The conversation basically centered on these two people outlining all the things Vonage hasn’t done like bundling broadband services into their offering and/or partnering with wireless companies. To be fair, Vonage has done some of this but not too successfully. A few years back Vonage had a stellar reputation -- at least a lot better than today… That was the time to strike these deals.
Perhaps management was too focused on going public and didn’t do as many deals as was needed to keep them alive for the long run.
The rush to go public may have been accelerated because the company knew they would need the money to pay the lawsuits they would lose. If this is the case, I would expect huge investor lawsuits. Not to say there aren’t already a massive number of lawsuits the company is dealing with.
Patricia Russo the CEO of Alcatel-Lucent reportedly has one month to turn the company around. They need to restructure desperately it seems and the board will no longer tolerate bad quarters. Russo my soon be pushed out of the company.
All of this puts immense pressure on the telecom equipment leader. In addition, I would imagine other equipment providers are looking at this transaction and wondering to themselves if it makes sense to merge or stay independent.
The Wall Street Journal reported that 3COM will be acquired by Bain Capital and Huawei Technologies. TMC’s Greg Galitzine has a call into 3COM for comments but what we know so far is the transaction is at $5+/share meaning more than $2 billion. Huawei and 3COM have been business partners in the past and my impression was this relationship didn’t result in the sales progress either company hoped for.Interestingly Huawei hasn’t made a huge dent in the US as of yet and this is surprising. Then again, I recently read an article discussing the idea that Chinese automakers will be slower to enter the US market in a serious way because their home market shows so much promise. I guess even the largest companies can only focus on so many things at once.
Perhaps this is the same situation for Huawei. The company is in the US and now with the 3COM acquisition they have a US partner to help them get to our channels of distribution. I look forward to seeing more formal announcements from Huawei/3COM in the upcoming days and weeks.
Also see coverage at Forbes.
For a financial perspective on what is happening to It is a gorgeous morning here in Connecticut but I am afraid these pictures only do partial justice to it. Enjoy.
Blogged via Wireless Handheld
Here is my Publisher’s Outlook from the October 2007 Internet Telephony Magazine. It is rough and needs some editing but should give you a good idea of why you should be subscribing and reading every issue of the magazine.
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The most recent Internet Telephony Conference & Expo in Los Angeles, California demonstrated to me (and everyone in attendance) just how strong the IP communications market is. We had a tremendous number of resellers, enterprise customers and service providers at the show. What perhaps caught me off guard most was just how high the energy level at the show was. I believe that a high energy level directly translates into a great environment for many companies in the IP communications space. Here is a video which captures some of this energy.ITEXPO Demographics
Marketers always need to understand who is buying what. There’s an old adage “Your best prospects are your existing customers.” Of course, finding some new ones isn’t a bad idea either, which is why vendors of IP equipment and services — not to mention media and expo organizations such as TMC — depend on accurate customer and industry demographics in shaping a strategy for the IP communications marketplace.
In the case of ITEXPO West 2007, the audience for this event consisted of the following:
- Enterprise: 35%
- Reseller: 32%
- Service Provider: 23%
- OEM/Developer: 10%
News and More News
An overwhelming amount of industry news emerged from this recent ITEXPO. In fact, I cannot remember a TMC event with more analysts, members of the press or articles written about news breaking from the show. I captured some of these stories in a recent blog entry.
Additionally, here’s a recap of my experience at the conference and the results of a few of my meetings there. . .
As the show launched, I moderated a session titled Making Money Selling VoIP and the panelists gave some important “takeaway” advice for the reseller community: Become a partner in your customer’s success or else. In other words, if you think your value lies in pulling cable at the customer’s premises you may be soon looking for a new line of work.
At the show I caught up with Gurmeet Lamba, the VP of Engineering at Clarus Systems, who told me that the company’s automated testing tools now handle end-to-end IP telephony management. A new module called Voice Monitor is a sophisticated rules-based alerting and notification engine.
As Lamba pointed out, “There is no complete list of why things happen,” referring to why IP communications systems occasionally have snafus. He went on to explain how sometimes problems pop up because a technician mis-provisions a system or at least a few components of a system. For this reason the Clarus Systems solution looks for security problems such as malicious calls, toll fraud, excessively long international calls and unencrypted endpoints among other things.
Lamba described how his company empowers unified communications and, as a side note, he explained how the solutions his company sells are “probe-free”.
The New Mitel/Inter-Tel
As you may be aware by now, Mitel recently acquired Inter-Tel and Inter-Tel has become Mitel U.S. under the leadership of CEO Norman Stout. Don Smith will remain the CEO of Mitel. The Mitel 3300 will be the company’s midsize platform going forward and the primary SMB solution will be the Inter-Tel 5000.
The company is working feverishly to allow interoperability between devices, phone systems and applications, as you might imagine.
Mitel feels they have some of the best customer support and service on the market and they all tell me their SMB solutions excel because the company doesn’t look at the SMB space as an unsophisticated market willing to settle for watered-down applications.
In an unexpected twist, the company’s spokesman, Simon Gwatkin, told me they even have a case study of how their phones saved a customer a few watts per seat on a large buy, which led to a more rapid ROI.
I also had a very interesting conversation with William “Duffy” Mich, Chairman and CEO of Aperio CI, regarding iPhone’s adoption in the enterprise. Duffy knows a great deal about these devices as he recently banned them from his office due to the massive amounts of productivity they zapped from his workers.
He explains that the iPhone is extremely unsecure -- especially the instant messages, e-mails and websites browsed. Moreover, the iPhone gobbles up business time in various other unproductive ways, making it a big time-waster.
Finally, Duffy mentioned the associated costs for which the iPhone has become infamous, such as the massive phone bills involving Europe — there is no unlimited international plan; the device sends data when off and bills are generally higher than expected.
Other issues worth noting are legal/regulatory in nature and could be a potential pitfall if iPhones are paid for by a company. One big problem is this: if the company pays for the device, the company has to be able to track data transmitted by it in a potentially improper manner. Therefore, all IMs and web pages need to be archived.
Other problems with the iPhone include the sheer physical size of the bill which in some cases has reached hundreds of pages each month because of the detailed way the activities of each phone are logged. Obviously, it would be more sensible to save this data and make it available online — and while we’re on this subject, just exactly how much data needs to be stored anyway? Every web page? Every video? Every GIF? These are some of the questions that must be answered.
Aperio CI sees an opportunity for service providers to generate revenue by helping companies with their archiving needs as they relate to regulatory compliance. There is also an opportunity to set alerts based on spending and or excessive usage. As you may have surmised, this is the area in which Aperio CI plays and the company is actively helping service providers tackle these issues today.
And speaking of service providers, I had a chance to sit down at the show with Bandwidth.com’s CEO Henry Kaestner and learn about their SIP trunking business. The company works with a number of partners from CDW to Fonality and Digium. Kaestner tells me he looks to make it easy to provide wholesale circuits and access lines and has a low 0.6% churn rate.
So what does a voice and data service provider do to grow their business? Expect bandwidth.com to start offering conferencing, hosted IP communications, email, storage and CRM services in the future.
If you are a reseller or hardware manufacturer, you may want to look up this interesting company.
From a service provider we go to a company which enables service providers — I spent some time with Greg Welch, the CEO of Global Touch Telecom who tells me that, aside from VoIP-enabling MDU providers DirectTV and Greenfield Communications, they are also powering a new service called “VoIP for Dummies”. Details are forthcoming.
Greg told me that their average reseller makes 50-70% gross profit. Contrast this to Broadsoft and Sylantro solutions he says that take a big share of the revenue out of a service provider’s pocket.
Thanks again to all of you who continue to make Internet Telephony Conference & Expo the best-attended show in IP Communications. I look forward to personally welcoming you all at our next event in Miami, January 23-25, 2008. You can register at ITEXPO.
Thanks all for the nice comments on ITEXPO two weeks ago in Los Angeles. These are a few we have posted so far. Here is the testimonial page which will be updated over time.
Video
Written
This news is pretty amazing to me. Companies are actually willing to spend their hard earned dollars to go green. According to this article, 52 percent of respondents are willing to pay 5 to 10 percent more for green products or services and 51 percent said are willing to trade 5 to 10 percent of server performance if it means lower carbon emissions.This is good news for companies investing resources to green out their product portfolios.
I have to admit, the press release (see bottom of page) I received this morning from Packet8/8x8 may be among the most unique I have ever received as it details how Packet8 is the service provider of choice for a VoIP service provider who is closing its doors. The question is who is this provider who has 12,000 subscribers who is exiting the space?This news is not surprising however to those of you who read Russell Shaw’s take on Packet8 based on the conversation he had with 8x8 CEO Bryan Martin at ITEXPO.
Here is a salient quote from this article:
SunRocket is not the only company having problems. We know of about three or four major players in the space that have significant customer bases, they’re both into both business and residential applications, and we’ve heard rumors that they’re interesting in exiting the market as VoIP service providers.
TMCnet’s Richard Zippy Grigonis also has some thoughts on the Bryan Martin keynote at the show. Here is a quote from this article:
“Differentiating services is key because it contradicts all of the metrics that Wall Street is complaining about right now about why VoIP is a four-letter word.”
By the way, Bryan said specifically if someone on Wall Street steps in something they look down and say “Oh VoIP!”
This of course is in response the Vonage and just how poorly this company’s stock has performed over the years. Just yesterday the stock dropped another 30% due to another patent infringement case. Furthermore, last night on CNBC’s Fast Money program the commentators said the only news Vonage makes these days is being down 30%.
Thankfully for the IP communications market there are very strong financial performers in the space like Cbeyond. 8x8 has been stable but since their outlook keeps getting better one has to imagine being in a similar space to Vonage is like swimming with a 20 pound weight around your waist. Astute investors will likely soon realize 8x8 is becoming a lot more like Cbeyond than Vonage.
Of course Vonage is the most visible company in the space and reminds me of the old adage, when you are first in the market you will have a lot of arrows in your back. How true.
Oh, and by the way… If you know the company closing its doors, please drop me a line.
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News Release Issued: September 26, 2007 8:15 AM EDT
8x8 Signs Exclusive Agreement with VoIP Service
Provider Exiting Market to Migrate Subscribers
SANTA CLARA, Calif., Sept. 26 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- 8x8, Inc. (NASDAQ:
EGHT), provider of Packet8 (http://www.packet8.net/) residential, business and video Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone services, today announced it has signed an agreement with a service provider that will soon exit the VoIP market calling for the exclusive recommendation of Packet8 as the replacement VoIP service for its soon-to-be-orphaned subscribers.
According to the agreement, Packet8 will be the only brand presented and promoted to the roughly 12,000 subscribers who will be left without VoIP phone service after the company winds down its VoIP operations over the next three months. In return, 8x8 will offer these subscribers a specially-priced
Packet8 monthly service plan along with a free month of service, free activation, free shipping and a free Uniden 165P 5.8 GHz cordless phone to transition to its award-winning VoIP phone service.
"We look forward to welcoming these VoIP consumers to the Packet8 family of subscribers," said 8x8 Vice President of Sales & Marketing Huw Rees. "8x8 has been providing VoIP services since 2002 and, unlike many competitors, has established a strong business model providing subscribers with solid assurance that our service will be operational for the long term and that our reputation for quality and reliability will be maintained."
Just over two months ago, SunRocket, the second largest independent VoIP provider, announced it was shutting down its service and referring its more than 200,000 subscribers to Packet8. 8x8, now the #2 standalone voice and video service provider, was recently awarded its 69th U.S. patent for proprietary VoIP technology employed in the Packet8 service. In addition to residential service, 8x8 provides more than 8,000 U.S. based small businesses with the Packet8 Virtual Office hosted iPBX complete business phone solution.
About 8x8, Inc.
VoIP service provider 8x8, Inc. offers internet-based telephony solutions
(http://www.packet8.net/) for individual residential and business users as well as small to medium sized business organizations. In addition to regular
Packet8 VoIP service plans priced as low as $24.99 per month for unlimited anytime calling to the U.S., Canada and eight additional countries, 8x8 offers the Packet8 Tango Video Terminal Adapter and DV 326 VideoPhone along with accompanying monthly service plans also priced at $24.99 per month.
Packet8 Virtual Office, 8x8's VoIP phone system for small to medium sized businesses, is a hosted PBX solution comprised of powerful business class features. Companies subscribing to Virtual Office pay just $49.99 per month per extension for enterprise class PBX functionality along with unlimited local and long distance calling in the U.S. and Canada. The Packet8 Complete Contact Center™ is a hosted multimedia call center distribution and management platform that works with any broadband Internet service and provides enterprise class contact center functionality combined with Virtual Office hosted iPBX calling features and business calling plans. Packet8 Softalk Office™, 8x8's PC-based soft phone client, offers high quality voice and video in-network calling as well as outbound calling to the PSTN.
For additional company information, visit 8x8's web site at http://www.packet8.net/.
NOTE: 8x8, the 8x8 logo, Packet8, the Packet8 logo, Packet8 Virtual Office,
Packet8 Softalk, Packet8 Tango and Packet8 Complete Contact Center are trademarks of 8x8, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
SOURCE: 8x8, Inc.
CONTACT: Joan Citelli, +1-408-687-4320, jcitelli@8x8.com
Web site: http://www.8x8.com/
I am fascinated by Yahoo’s Candidate Mashup as it allows you to do something never before possible. For the first time you can click on the candidates you are interested in and the issues you are interested in and see the views of each candidate. This is a use of technology which is truly fantastic.The idea while great is in its infancy. Why? Well candidates still have to somehow be able to update their positions on topics. It is not clear if Yahoo! News does this now or not.
So in the future I would expect topical XML feeds from various candidates. These views would be funneled to Yahoo! News and other sites who can compete for viewers on the best interface, best community development, etc.
I feel this is the first step in a coming genre of video mashups which will likely be very popular in politics and financial news. It will be very interesting to see how this idea progresses.
These are mighty difficult times for Vonage as the incumbent providers have ganged up against them and have decided to compete on patents as opposed to technology. A federal jury has ruled that Vonage has to pay $69.5 million in damages to Sprint Nextel for using its patents. This is ultimately terrible news for consumers. I continue to be amazed at phone companies who say they have patents for VoIP and related technologies yet haven’t rolled the technology out to customers. Or they have rolled it our half a decade after the technology was patented.
The reality of the situation is Vonage is a fantastic marketing company and not a technology company. Technology companies often file for and receive numerous patents. A broad patent portfolio is a shield against patent lawsuits.
So Vonage had limited patent protection and marketing that should have made all the telcos envious. This is quite an achievement and shaking up a century-old industry is something to be proud of.
What is sad however is how easy it is to wipe a company away using not technology or better customer service but instead a patent portfolio which was amassed when the government was admittedly giving away patents too freely. So the IP communications market owes a great deal of gratitude to Vonage for what the company has accomplished. At the same time we should be upset the company did not acquire the patents they needed to be along-term success story. Sure, the game is not over but it is looking a lot worse from where I am standing.
A great day for travel. Wish you were here.
Blogged via Wireless Handheld
I just can’t believe how much cheaper it gets over time to use communications services. When I was a teenager we paid somewhere around 25 cents per minute just to call one state away. Before we had fax machines we had to spend around ten dollars to get a document across the country. IP communications has changed all of this.
But things keep getting better and better in the telecom world. In the UK you can now talk on your cell phone for free if you choose to see ads on your device. The company providing this service is called Blyke and there is a great article about it in today’s New York Times.
Look around your world and you will see prices going higher on just about everything else except telecom. Electricity, oil, gas, property taxes, etc. Even milk and eggs are getting more expensive. Communications on the other hand continues to go lower in price.
This is great for consumers and for companies who can figure out how to make money via advertising on mobile devices. Communications has been and continues to be one of the few areas that gives more for less and is truly a friend of the consumer/business.
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