April 2009 Archives

Sagem-Interstar Inc. (Sagem Communications) of Montreal, Canada  has been selling advanced fax server solutions for IP networks globally since 2002. Their technology leverages IP telephony and Unified Communications (UC) systems to boost productivity, collaboration activities and overall ROI.

At VoiceCon I caught up with Sagem's John Nikolopoulos, Director of Marketing; Corey Wilson, Product Specialist; and Gisele Seto, Marketing Communications Manager.

Sagem-Interstar had just launched their XMediusFAX Release 6.0, said to be the industry's first T.38 FoIP solution to offer major enterprise and remote branch office fax survivability. Automatic failover has long been a big topic in mission critical telecom applications, and Sagem's "self healing" technology enables automatic failover to branch office facilities - if the WAN goes down, it resorts to other available forms of transport (such as the local PSTN interface at the branch office) and the branch office can switch to a local "lighter" app that can deal with its faxing needs.

The system runs in conjunction with Cisco ISRs (Integrated Services Routers), Cisco's line of branch office routers/gateways, many of which come with built-in Virtual Private Network (VPN) hardware encryption and acceleration, firewall, IDS/IPS, NAT, QoS support and IP telephony functionality. The Network Module Extension (NME) is a card which allows third party applications to be installed on ISR. It contains a processor, memory, hard drive and an optional network card. The Application eXtension Platform (AXP) is Cisco's operating system on the NME Board, which is based on a Linux environment haiving a specific software library to communicate with the ISR. When Van Meter Industrial, a large North American electrical and automation wholesale distributor (and long-time XMediusFAX SP customer), first deployed the new XMediusFAX 6.0 branch survivability FoIP solution within a Cisco AXP/ISR 2800 environment (to deal with the possible loss of fax service at a remote branch due to WAN link problems), they quickly performed the AXP integration by just plugging the NME module into their existing Cisco ISR router and configuring the software.

"XMediusFAX software solutions provide users the flexibility to rapidly send and receive faxes from many kinds of interfaces such as desktop email clients, MFPs, cell phones, and so forth. We can support these with guaranteed performance", says John Nikolopoulos. "By minimizing fax application downtime, an organization's productivity, revenue, and even corporate reputation are preserved. Our intelligent engine can exploit advanced routing policy-based routing rules and allows you to switch ports as necessary. And of course, our system is highly scalable as well as fault resilient, without compromising its security features."

In all, XMediusFAX software take the global TDM to IP migration trend in stride by streamlining your operations and lowering the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). It can also deal with such "moving targets" as unified communications, virtualization and increasingly versatile multifunction devices (MFDs).

Perhaps most importantly it can give companies who rely on fax the peace of mind to know they can conduct business via this legally binding technology, even when there are WAN outages which may disable their other forms of communications.

There is no question this economy has forced virtually every household and business to economize but it has done more than that... It has made most companies think long and hard about how they can become more productive and efficient. Sometimes this is referred to bluntly as doing more with less.

Oftentimes corporations have less people than ever but have to do the same work if not more. Sure we continue to roll out divorce-creating devices that let our knowledge workers answer emails in bed but let's take a break from the gadgets (don't worry, I will write about them again soon --- I promise) and discuss the corporate software companies need to enable them to compete effectively.

Two of these categories are ERP and CRM and most companies that don't have both know they need them. But for those that do only 9% have them integrated and it seems to me just getting these systems to Interop more effectively is a simple way to turbocharge corporate productivity.

Sure it isn't easy but one of the first steps you may be interested in taking down this journey to ERP and CRM integration is this sponsored whitepaper from Sage Software which is quite informative and thankfully graphically appealing.

One reason I find it very useful is because it is chock full of research from Time Magazine and Fortune that you need to be aware of. I hope you find it useful.

It looks like Nortel could be gone as a standalone company in the next few weeks according to published reports. The news is sad but true. It looks like Avaya or Siemens could pick up the enterprise pieces. The optical division could go to Fujitsu, Huaweii, Alcatel-Lucent or potentially a private equity firm. The wireless unit could go to NSN.

What is terrible about the situation from my perspective is the communications and tech spaces are doing well relative to most other markets. In other words, this downturn for these markets has not been terrible. And there is a chance we could see these spaces bounce back faster than other industries.

This IMHO makes the Nortel assets very valuable as they are going for bargain-basement prices and their upside potential is probably good.

I should mention that some of the companies on the list above are not known for their customer facing marketing... If you are one of those companies you will likely not see the value from the assets you pick up.

The real value here is to put a better sales and marketing engine in front of some of the best engineering around. If that is done it will be the best possible outcome for employees, customers and the acquirers.

While wandering around VoiceCon recently, I was struck by how many different kinds of communications platforms are available for organizations, and many companies attempting to tackle unified communications must eventually find themselves in a multivendor environment needing "unified management". How does one administer and do "Moves, Adds, Changes and Deletes" (MACDs) under such conditions?

Fortunately, I ran into Unimax at the show, a Minneapolis, Minnesota-based, privately-held company specializing in unified voice administration applications. Their flagship product, 2nd Nature, replaces the native interfaces of your multi-vendor PBX, voice mail and other business systems with a single, easy-to-use administration tool. 2nd Nature can unify the management of MACDs, password resets (assisted and self-service), automated provisioning, automated voice mail list management, transaction auditing, reporting, and other things. Unimax' 2nd Nature also makes possible integration between your voice network and business systems such as Active Directory, HR, call accounting, E-911, and so forth. By concentrating such administrative abilities into a single point, companies can further reduce operational costs, strengthen security, increase visibility and control, and improve internal customer service.

At the show, Unimax "pre-announced" their release of 2nd Nature Version 6.8. This most recent version of 2nd Nature will have support for AVST's CallXpress and Cisco's Unity Connection. Version 6.8 also enhances existing compatibility with PBX and voicemail systems from Avaya, Cisco, and Nortel. For example, there's now compatibility with Avaya's Modular Messaging Version 5.0 and Cisco's UCM Version 6.1.3 and 7.0.1. Support will also be added for Nortel's 1200-series phone sets. It also enhances compatibility with Microsoft Active Directory, contains a few new workflow productivity enhancements, and other types of business systems will also be supported and enhanced in the new version. Hence, Unimax 2nd Nature is now compatible with systems from quite an array of vendors: Avaya, AVST, Cisco, Nortel, Aastra, Microsoft, and others.

Todd Remely, Director of Marketing at Unimax Systems, says, "In addition to having 2nd Nature support AVST's CallXpress, we're also partnering with AVST. Adding AVST and Cisco to what we're compatible with has come in response to industry demand. Enterprises and managed service providers now have a way to inexpensively unify and simplify administration of complex multi-vendor voice systems. In terms of cost reduction alone, 2nd Nature now not only offers multivendor visibility and management of PBX and voicemail systems, but customers can use their system to gain visibility and control and management of all those platforms. There's improved internal customer service, password resets are easy, security has been improved, and 2nd Nature now has a single sign-in. In this way password proliferation is kept under control, since there's easier password management now available."

Unimax' only competition are genuine native systems, the administration of which are still independent. But don't worry, Unimax' partners are helping to get the message out.

If you look at TMC from the outside and find yourself asking how you can get a job as an intern at this global integrated media company which builds communities online, in print and in person while gaining marketshare regardless of economic climate, I have some great news to share. We are looking for a small army of interns who want to learn what it's like to take on major multibillion dollar media companies with infinite resources and consistently win.

We will teach you how to sell collaboratively - how to listen and to be loved by your customers (well most of them anyway).

We will teach you integrated marketing and online marketing - not theory but ever-evolving practice.

If you love media and want to work at the company that is light years ahead online, contact us ASAP. We are very picky so if you aren't a super-hard worker and collaboration and hat-wearing are not your middle names, let's end our relationship now as friends (it's not you it's me).

One last thought about TMC - our culture is unusual - we have the financial stability of a 37 year-old company with the energy and enthusiasm of a start-up.

Let's just say if you're thinking of contacting us, please don't delay


Here's more:

The Sales & Marketing internship position at TMC is designed to provide hands-on experience that will be mutually beneficial for both the intern and the organization. The internship position is designed to challenge students and provide them with practical experience in the advertising and media industry.

TMC is looking for a dynamic, creative, enthusiastic, high energy professional to support the Sales organization, to help build advertising and marketing presentations for prospects and clients.

• Work with sales & marketing team to assist in the implementation of various campaigns
• Contribute to the creative input in building campaigns and support the campaigns
• Copyediting and proofreading
• Communicate with customers and peers
• Minimum Qualifications:
• Working towards completion of a college degree program in business, marketing or communication
• Excellent communication skills verbal and written
• Proficient in Microsoft Office suite, specifically PowerPoint and Excel
• Excellent communication skills
• Detail Oriented
• Initiative and proactive thinking
• Team player
• Ability to multi-task and work in a fast paced environment meeting deadlines

Adtran has nearly two thousand products in its catalog and is in a good position to tell us where the business hot spots are.

I just had a conversation with Chris Thompson and Tammie Dodson at the company regarding the bright spots in their business and they tell me the optical side is doing well, partially because of the broadband stimulus activity which carriers are seeing. They expect this to continue as more details come out regarding this initiative.

Also they say their VoIP gateway business is strong as a result of companies exploring the cost cutting benefits of SIP trunking. They think there needs to be more education in the market about SIP trunking and we agreed there seems to be more of it every day.

Check out my interview with Ronny Gorlicki of Comsys an israeli semiconductor company specializing in communications, who details the benefits of using his company's chips in WiMAX devices. Gorlicki shows off a number of interesting Comsys-powered WiMAX gadgets which are at different price points and aimed at different markets. One thing he touted to me about his company's solutions are that they are truly integrated FMC devices which integrate radio access seamlessly allowing you to network hop easily.
 

The mobile video opportunity grows by leaps and bounds and with bigger mobile screens and faster wireless broadband networks, we can expect larger amounts of revenue to be derived from mobile video by carriers and content providers.

Dilithium Networks (www.dilithiumnetworks.com), founded in Sydney, Australia, offers converged video solutions, with customers in 60 countries on five continents. The company grew out of the participation on the ITU-T H.324/H.324M workgroup by Dr. Marwan Jabri, a company founder and CTO. Jabri spent nearly 20 years developing intelligent signal processing multimedia coding and transcoding algorithms, as well as some early protocol stack implementations of the H.324/H.324M standard. Today Jabri's company, Dilithium carries on and has brought his work to commercial fruition, as it provides pioneering mobile video solutions for network operators, content owners, and aggregators across 2G, 3G, and WiFi networks. They're the global market share leader in terms of their 3G-324M/H.324M/H.324 Protocol Stack and inventive Unicoding technology for high performance intelligent media transcoding. Indeed, Dilithium pioneered the field of 3G mobile video. There software can be found in many phones.

At CTIA Wireless recently, I ran into Paul Zuber, is the founding CEO of Dilithium. He told me that Dilithium is enjoying 400 percent growth year-over-year in the areas of mobile, broadband, Internet, mobile video and surveillance applications. 85 percent of their business occurs outside of the U.S. Some readers may know Dilithium as a world leader in multimedia gateways (said to be a 60 percent global market share) including their The DTG 3000 Multimedia Gateway family that provides a multimedia solution for cellular, IP, and PSTN convergence as networks evolve towards the IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) architecture. Others may be familiar with their Video Ringback Tone Solution, VT-Ring, or their Integrated multimedia gateway and service creation environment, ViVAS, or their QoS Video Telephony Probe for QoS, or perhaps their Video Refresh technology that can eliminate video corruption in mobile networks.

Zuber says there's been increasing demand for anything related to supporting video and services, and social networks are starting to have an impact, as is the craze for user-generated content. Dilithium supports content adaptation so any content can travel to and be experienced via any codec to any device - it's all an outgrowth of their transcoding, transrating, and transizing expertise. They have end-to-end solutions for 3G networks and a powerful service creation platform -- Zuber says they can roll new services in just six weeks. This is pretty remarkable, especially when you consider that the modern network is a jumble of differing standards, codecs and bit rates. Dilithium's technological expertise also extends from mobile (2.5G, 3G, EDGE, Smartphones, WiFi) to set-top boxes. The customers themselves, of course, are agnostic to access methodology, they just want somebody like Dilithium to make it easy for them to access content, and for it to be a high-quality experience, regardless of whether it's delivered by H.264, H.263, Flash, Windows Media, Quicktime, or what have you.

"We enable protocol translation," says Zuber, "but bringing IP to the mobile world is a tougher proposition. The U.S. is still an emerging market. Things are more advanced on the Internet than on wireless. Still, we've had wins with many Internet aggregators and carriers, and they're starting to launch services. We've helped Vodafone, for example, as well as China Telecom, SingTel, and so forth. Pricing plans and business models are starting to take shape. Our cash flow is positive and we're profitable."
 

I got a chance to demo the technology on an iPhone and was blown away by the quality of the stream over the AT&T 3G network. I happened to be driving in a portion of Connecticut with poor cellphone coverage and was surprised that the stream kept playing in areas where I remember having problems talking. I would imagine most users would be impressed with this technology as well and pay serious money for the ability to stream live TV to their cellphones. Obviously this capability exists today but the screen size of an iPhone makes it an especially compelling viewing experience and I would imagine AT&T should be in a big rush to roll this out to the masses.

I would of course precede all programming with a stern warning about the dangers of watching TV as you drive which as you can imagine can be quite distracting as it was to me.

Who is the best potential acquirer of Joost, the web-based TV service which was launched by Skype founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom? The cable companies of course and although you would imagine the cablecos would be all over this deal, so far they have opted out of buying the company that is supposedly shopping itself. As this article points out, Joost lost momentum and does not have a great deal of traffic. A cable company however could certainly boost the traffic with content deals and promotion through its various vehicles.

The question is, why not start from scratch if you are a cable company and are doing so much of the work?

I guess if no cable companies come to the table there is always eBay.

If you are interested in seeing how much a website is worth - especially one that takes advertisements, check out Pufip, a site which summarizes a great deal of information on backlinks and other important metrics from various sources onto a single page. The site approximates how much advertising revenue websites generate as well. I question it's accuracy though as I haven't been able to figure out how it generates proprietary pricing information and other private details it would need to know like percentage of inventory sold, etc.

So from this perspective it does not seem accurate enough to use for anything official but it may be a helpful place for aggregated content such as Google Page Rank, Alexa and Compete charts, etc.

TMCnet's Michael Dinan writes a great article about Bump, a new app (app store link) which you can use to send contact info you specify via WiFi by simply bumping fists with another iPhone or iPod touch user. For testing purposes, Michael used me and my iPhone as Guinea Pig and a few moments later we had shared info with one another. It was very compelling and it's worth mentioning the devices do not need to be in physical contact to interchange data. The software does need to be running though.

This app could become popular at trade shows and other gathering places and if it does become the standard for live information interchange it could become a natural extension of social networking in live gatherings.