VoIP Blog - Tehrani.com

October 5, 2007

In July of 2004 Avaya and Motorola explained to me how their new FMC partnership would be great for business users. They even launched a new phone called the CN620 in fact. I haven’t heard much about the initiative between the companies in awhile and this could mean it either didn’t go according to plan or I just missed the evolving news. The issue hasn’t been important enough for me to pick up the phone and call the fine people over at Avaya and ask them about it.

 

I was reminded of this old news today when I came across this article about how Avaya and Nokia are collaborating on dual-mode devices for the enterprise. If you are the lucky user of a Nokia E60, E61 or E70 you are able to now download the Avaya one-X Mobile software for Symbian Dual Mode application and you are all set.

 

A big fear for a company like Avaya and even Cisco, Nortel and others has got to be that Research In Motion will continue to grow. In fact I wonder if this is part of the reason Avaya is moving quickly to have the best dual mode solution possible. RIM has been on an absolute tear and their stock is at a new high yet again. It seems every week the company makes a new high and the Canadian based wireless leader is now worth over $63 billion! By contrast Avaya is worth under $8 billion.

 

What could RIM do with this market cap and the huge amount of cash flow it generates? It could come on strong as a PBX player by rebranding an Asterisk-based system or even buy a company like Avaya – and quite easily I might add.

 

Then they go after the CTOs and telecom decision-makers in all the organizations where they have a BES. Game over for many PBX companies.

 

Much the same way Cisco used the router angle to attack the telecom budget; RIM can use the BES decision-makers to influence telecom purchases.

 

Of course this is easier said than done but it is an area Research in Motion must be considering.

 

The downside may be that the enterprise voice business is not as glamorous as the gadget business right now and a huge acquisition in anything other than wireless would likely cut the company’s valuation. A smaller acquisition could make more sense. Even as an experiment I think the Blackberry maker may be inclined to try this idea out to ensure they explore all avenues of growth for shareholders.

 

In an article this past May titled RIM Does Unified Communications I explained how RIM is already looking at the PBX integration space and even playing in it. Could this be the first step in an evolving strategy? I’ll be sure to let you know as I find out.

Disclosure: The author owns shares in RIMM

October 5, 2007

I thought it would be interesting to see what people search on when they come to TMCnet. It should be noted these searches are on TMCnet proper which unfortunately at the moment does not include blogs.

 

These numbers should be taken with a grain of salt because if a search is embedded in a web link and that link is crawled repeatedly by search engine spiders you come up with a situation where numbers may be skewed. Be that as it may, it is worth sharing some of the information from the last month if for no other reason than as a diversion from more important pursuits such as doing your (and my) job. :)

 

October 5, 2007

If you want to get an idea of just hot virtual worlds are these days consider there has been a billion dollars invested in this technology in the past year. More amazingly this amount of money has been divided and parceled into 35 companies. Some of these distributions of capital were acquisitions and others were investments. There is obviously a lot of money out there thinking virtual worlds will be huge. I agree there is a great amount of potential in areas like Second Life and others and there are two supporting arguments for this thought.

 

E-commerce – especially fashion is a natural area for virtual world revenue growth. We will see people trying on clothes virtually in the future.

 

The second area is video games. There is a worldwide obsession with these games and virtual worlds are naturally blending with virtual worlds.

Here is more on the subject from the Mercury News.

October 5, 2007

Dialogic has been gaining a great deal of momentum this past year and now this momentum has increased substantially as the company has just announced they will be acquiring Cantata. This deal gives Dialogic access to huge fax market share as well as the Excel and SnowShore product lines, significantly enhancing Dialogic’s position in the service provider market according to Jim Machi the company’s Vice President of Marketing.

 

Machi also explained this acquisition will be significant for Dialogic customers as there is a great deal of service provider know-how which Dialogic will now have access to. He further mentioned the company is extremely excited about this transaction.

 

In the nineties there were a number of companies in the DSP resource board market -- Dialogic, NMS, Brooktrout, Rhetorex, Aculab and Pika Technologies were some of these names. Through a series of acquisitions Rhetorex became part of Brooktrout which changed names to Cantata. And now, Cantata has become Dialogic.

 

As you may recall, just under a year ago, Nick Jensen explained to a crowd in Lisbon, Portugal that he wanted to double the company’s sales to $400 million within three years. Certainly the company has access to more product lines and technology than ever before as a result of this transaction. I would imagine this news should help the company get closer to this goal. Expect more news on this matter on my blog and on TMCnet throughout the day.