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Kill the Paper Clip
October 2, 2007
Am I the only one who despises this paper clip that occasionally appears on my screen and tells me what to do? Do we really need this weightless piece of metal telling us what to do? Anyway, this thing appeared on my screen today and I just wasn't in the mood for it. I guess it is always best to take out my agression on an inanimate object. :)
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Phil Hill
October 2, 2007
Welcome Phil Hill to TMCnet as a columnist. Phil’s column is titled Hosted Hearsay and his first article is titled Small Business VoIP: Is it an Elephant or Gorilla? Where he discusses the reason why all SMBs are lumped together.
Here is a salient part of the article:
Small Business is a Big Market
While similarities between eating five-toed pachyderms and the small business market may seem a stretch, let’s remember that they have one thing in common: they’re both very large. According to U.S. Census data, there are 5,083,750 businesses in the U.S. and of these, 4,931,237 have one hundred employees or less. So let’s settle on this as being the definition of a small business.
Before you pat yourself on the back and let out a collective exhale of relief, hold on a minute — you haven’t even gotten out your knife and fork yet. The real work hasn’t started yet — at least not for anyone in the small business VoIP market. It’s time to start slicing and dicing.
I am impressed with Hill’s writing and as you recall, I mentioned yesterday if you want to be considered as a TMCnet columnist drop Greg Galitzine a line.
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HTC Phones
October 2, 2007
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It is times like this I get jealous of the smartphones the Europeans get. HTC makes a pretty good device in the 6700 and these devices are likely better as they are newer and have better processors and in some cases form factors.The new smartphones—HTC Shift (available November), HTC S730 (available this month) and HTC P6500 (available November)—are aimed at the business user, featuring mobile computing features such as souped-up mobile messaging. HTC also announced a line of headsets intended for use with the new smartphones.
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HTC described its Shift smartphone as a device that combines “the power of Windows Vista with always-connected 3G/HSDPA connectivity.” It features HTC’s new SnapVUE technology, which provides users with access to calendar, e-mail, SMS messaging and contacts without needing to boot up—thus extending battery life. The Shift weighs 800 grams (about 1.8 lbs.) and has a 7-inch, touch-sensitive screen.Dear, HTC – I would love to review some of these. Just send them my way when you read this.
TMCnet’s Mae Kowalke has the scoop on all three new European smartphones.
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Response Point
October 2, 2007
For at least a decade PBX manufacturers would speak to me off the record about their trepidation regarding Microsoft entering the phone business. For those companies who hoped the day would never come, they should probably avoid reading this article from TMCnet’s Greg Galitzine detailing the availability of Response Point.
Microsoft has partnered with a number of companies to bring these systems to market. Some of the partners consist of Quanta Computer, D-Link and more recently Aastra. The cost for the systems is between $2,500-$3,000 for 4-5 users.
I have used Microsoft’s Response Point phone system both in TMC Labs and in Microsoft’s Redmond office. It has a solid feature set and in some areas such as speech recognition is ahead of most other comparable products on the market.
Still, this is a new release and with all new products, it is unlikely to be 100% perfect. If there are any glaring omissions, Tom Keating didn’t find them in his initial review.Microsoft is very serious about this market (see Microsoft OCS 2007 vs. Microsoft Response Point) and even offers financing to move these units into the hands of Joe (is Jane more politically correct?) entrepreneur.
Should small phone system manufacturers be shaking in their boots? The answer is unclear so far. It will take time for resellers who are not telephony people to be able to sell telecom solutions effectively. In the mean time, small phone system manufacturers will have time to position their products against Microsoft effectively. It is also unclear how anxious the majority of the Microsoft reseller base is to move this product.
Again, time will tell. Whenever there is new activity in the communications space – especially from a company like Microsoft who is adding some innovation, the customer wins.
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3Com and Digium News
October 2, 2007
If you haven’t been watching lately there has been lots of activity in the IP PBX and networking space from 3Com and Digium. Here is a recap.
3Com was recently purchased and a minority investor was China’s Huawei. This could be good for 3Com as having improved ties in China for manufacturing and distribution is a good thing. This is also good news for Huawei, a company looking to grow more quickly in the US.
In addition, Digium purchased Switchvox and the goal of this acquisition seems to be making Asterisk as easy to use as possible. TMCnet’s Tom Keating has some interesting perspective on the purchase and even more interesting graphics. I think this purchase is good for the Asterisk community as it takes some very useful proprietary code and makes it open source. According to Mark Spencer, “We definitely intend to move some of the technology from Switchvox into open source Asterisk.”
Finally, there is the news about 3Com and Digium collaborating and the result is two new Asterisk-based phone systems the VCX Connect 100 and 200. By the way the Connect 100 scales to 100 users and the 200 scales to 250. A bit non-intuitive I agree but you’ll be glad this is the case when you hire your 201st worker.
For more information on these new phone systems I direct you to Greg Galitzine’s excellent analysis. By the way, Digium’s VP of Marketing Bill Miller used to work for 3Com and was an important voice in pushing 3Com in the direction of Linux. As Bill is the common element between both companies, the collaboration between 3Com and Digium is natural. It also helps reduce development costs for 3Com and at the same time gives Digium a shot in the arm as more and more PBX manufacturers jump on the Asterisk bandwagon.
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Ixia’s New President and COO
October 2, 2007
Loyal TMC readers and visitors are likely aware of Atul Bhatnagar who was a keynote speaker about two years back at ITEXPO in Los Angeles, CA. The year Atul spoke was the first time Internet Telephony Conference & Expo was in the Los Angeles Convention Center and this was also the first time we had Michael Powell and Carly Fiorina as speakers so apologies in arrears to Bhatnagar if these two other speakers may have received excessive promotion by me at the time.Lately though it hasn’t been Fiorina or Powell making headlines. If you haven’t been paying attention, Bhatnagar has been making some big news of his own as he is now the new President and COO of Ixia. I recently had some time to catch up with him and I was able to learn about his new position at the company.
Although he isn’t ready to preach strategy to me yet he is doing quite a bit of analysis of the business and is spending a great deal of time with current customers. So far he sees lots of opportunity in the business. Of course this should come as no surprise as he left Nortel to come to this testing leader.
According to Bhatnagar, “Ixia needs to diagnose issues end-to-end and bring solutions together so customers can deploy converged networks.”
In addition he mentioned the more standards in the testing business the better. Moreover his company is looking to holistically test wireless, wired, data and voice networks.
Another important point he made is that as Ixia pulls together solutions, they want to provide key applications over one architecture with backwards compatibility and future protection for customers.
A final note is the concept of the evolution of multimedia networks. As they evolve he sees scaling going to the next level – testing will need to handle orders of magnitude more simultaneous traffic.
Our conversation digressed into how companies are using testing as a differentiator and how in some cases such as the recent Skype outage, a lack of testing actually can cost a company revenue and also leave it with a black eye in front of customers.
As the testing market gets more complicated we can expect the testing vendors to spend more and more time figuring out how to make life easier for customers who are generally service providers and enterprise customers looking to deploy IP communications and other networks.
So – no hard hitting investigative journalism at this time but in the future I expect to meet with Atul Bhatnagar and ask him about his thoughts on the testing market and how his company will help customers become more productive, efficient and profitable.
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