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The advent of the internet, SIP trunking, intense competition and the economic downturn has contributed to changing the channel partner market forever and if you are doing the same things you always did as a channel partner you may get wiped off the earth in the next few years. You need to change. How? Well I would spoil it if I told you and didn't allow you to listen to the podcast which is complete and dare I say elaborate. It is worth a listen if you are in any segment of the telecom or technology spaces and the lessons you can learn here are applicable to other segments of the market.

Just when you thought VoIP and IP fax service could not get cheaper, along comes sipgate, a company offering a similar service to Skype/Vonage but with lower international rates than Skype and lots of free features like a free phone number, free toll-free calling, free inbound calling and free inbound faxes. sipgate one is the name of the service and company CEO Thilo Salmon tells Tom Keating in a scoop mini-review of the service that most users will spend less than $5/month.

To be fair, MagicJack starts at $29.95/year and doesn't offer some of the features of sipgate one. Tom seems impressed with the product and this new offering just shows you that prices on IP communications services can get cheaper indeed.

You have no doubt noticed how traditional information technology vendors have embraced communications in response to customers who are looking for integrated and cost-effective solutions which span both markets. This thought occurred to me during a conversation with Mark Goodman, VP of Marketing for Ecessa a company focusing on "Uptime for IP networks," according to Goodman.

Last year the company quietly changed its name from Astrocom and even if you haven't heard of either company it is worth looking at their products as they solve real-world corporate problems such as security through their ShieldLink family which takes the company's PowerLink line of load balancing WAN optimization controllers and adds VPN gateway and firewall capabilities.

More recently the company announced ClariLink which takes ShieldLink and adds a SIP proxy, registrar and SBC allowing real-time failover for SIP sessions going over IP networks. Goodman explains you don't need service provider peering relationships or BGP with this solution and this saves you money.

Instead, the company uses NAT to traverse the network and their SIP proxy alleviates the double NATing problem which plagued enterprise VoIP in the good old days.

It is worth clarifying that one benefit of using this solution is there is no session loss if a WAN link goes down.

The product line is peripherally competitive to Acme Packet but there is more of a focus on smaller companies which correspond to the company's recent Covergence acquisition. Ingate would be another competitor to the product family as well. A recent announcement at Interop is that these appliances are getting scaled up to a 500 model which joins the family of 50 and 25. Higher model numbers allow a larger number of supported simultaneous sessions and capacity and the 500 model can support one million concurrent sessions and has gigabit throughput.

As IP communications gains even more traction in the enterprise we can expect more products which are aimed at helping companies consolidate multiple disparate functions into single-appliance, single-server or single-vendor solutions.

See Also: Ixia's IxNetwork and Juniper's Router Successfully Validate LST

There is nothing that builds a resume more like an award and if you are a developer, you definitely want to keep an eye on the new Dialogic Innovator Award contest which will not only give you some great bragging rights, you could win some prizes as well.


Dialogic was nice enough to ask me to be one of the judges in fact and I am looking forward to being part of this program. Winners get a free one-year service and support contract, a $5,000 credit towards future Dialogic products, t-shirts, press releases and an Innovator logo which I imagine can be invaluable in boosting a company's marketing efforts.

Sure it isn't a $75,000 motorcycle - which makes a great gift for your favorite blogger by the way, but hey, times are tough.

The catch? None really - you have to apply of course and Dialogic wants to also take a moment to invite you to participate in the Dialogic Exchange Network while they have your attention.

At one point in my career I was a programmer and I wish I had the time to participate in this contest. If I did, I would write an app that taps into all my social networks and then monitors my cell phone's GPS to determine when I am in the car. When I am driving, I would want it to call me every 15 minutes and update me on what's happening with my friends and relatives. I would want my news alerts tapped as well in case there is breaking news I need to know about.

Oh and of course I would want WAV file to social networking integration in this app so I could speak and have the files live on the net with links from Twitter, etc.

But that's just me and you don't need to do what I said to win. It wouldn't hurt of course. You have until September 30^th 2009 to apply so open a new window right now and get started. Good luck!

Last week at Interop my team conducted over 100 interviews with thought leaders at the show. Topics discussed include green switching, testing, Ethernet, cloud computing and more. So far, half a dozen of the videos have been posted and more are being added continually. I hope you find them helpful.

I have embedded some of these for your immediate viewing pleasure. Here is the page which will store all of these videos.

Chris Loeffler, Global Applications Manager and Lennart Jonsson, Vice President Technology, Eaton

Kevin Goulet, Senior Marketing Director, Enterprise WLAN, Motorola Enterprise Mobility Solutions, Motorola

Kevin Ryan, Director, Data Center Solutions, Extreme Networks

On a recent flight back from Europe I marveled at the ice littering the North Atlantic. A flight attendant told me it was sad as what appeared to be ice cubes from a mile or more in the air used to be icebergs. I am concerned about the environment but I am not sure I agree with the carbon cap and trade system being proposed in the US as it could adversely impact the economy.

But last I checked, regulation gets passed without my express permission and in a world where CO2 is becoming a pollutant, you need to be more aware of energy use and carbon emissions than ever before.

I am especially looking forward to the upcoming sponsored TelcoBridges webinar on TMCnet which will help educate the market on how data centers can lower their energy use.

Even if cap and trade does not become reality this year it is apparent that governments are more and more likely to impose penalties for carbon emissions. Since reducing energy use saves money as well, it behooves everyone with data center decision making authority to be part of this timely event.

I had a good time at Interop this last week catching up with the industry and seeing where the strengths in technology are. Some bright spots were virtualization, cloud computing, Ethernet and wireless. Some of the old guard companies I have tracked for years were impressive in the products they rolled out and others who were once networking giants had large, empty booths devoid of anything interesting.

Green/energy efficient computing was another hot button but there seemed to be less excitement about these areas than at last year's event. Ironically more companies were pushing these ideas - but they just weren't proposed as primary reasons to buy as they have been in years past.

I stopped by a networking reception at Avocent threw after one of the days at the show. The event was meant to celebrate the roll out of MergePoint Infrastructure Explorer. Here is a shot of Ben Grimes onstage discussing the new product and is thanking customers.
 

A bit later the company used a Star Trek skit with their engineers as cast members to showcase the products' capabilities. Bottom line, using Infrastructure Explorer gives you deeper insight into data center details and happenings allowing more efficient management.

I will be writing more about the show soon but I thought it worth sharing that for a major tech event the mood was upbeat but cautious. The traffic in the hall was strong the first day based on what I saw and the next two days slowed according to the many vendors who came to the TMC booth for meetings and video interviews.

What was more interesting was that companies who had products in the above categories seemed to have shows which exceeded expectations.

What this tells you is that if you are cutting your R&D budgets because of this downturn, your company may be in big trouble as others are innovating and customers are rewarding the innovators - especially in the current growth areas.

For nearly 13 years, Greg Galitzine has been a tremendously valuable part of the TMC team. His career started as an editor for CTI Magazine in 1996. Where he reported on the collision of the computer and communications spaces including what we called IP telephony back in the day. In 1997 we convened a meeting with Greg to explore whether it made sense to launch a publication in the IP telephony space. The outcome of the meeting was to launch what we hoped would become a cornerstone of what we hoped would be a new industry - Internet Telephony Magazine.

Greg became the editor of this publication and had the vision to see this is where the industry was going. Many companies in the communications space told us we were nuts for launching this publication as at the time there was no industry, just a few nerds calling each other on softphones.

Lo and behold, over the past decade this nerdy, niche technology revolutionized telecom to the point where business models have changed, new entrants have come into the telecom market and entire industries were transformed through international outsourcing made possible by inexpensive VoIP-based telephony.

In the last few years, Greg did a great job helping transform TMCnet into a major web force in communications and technology news. We are grateful to him for the years he has put in.

I am very happy for Greg as recently he has been given a great opportunity which involves a move to a new industry altogether. Galitzine has accepted a position with ISA, Inc., a prime contractor to the National Nuclear Security Administration and working in about 18 countries through Central and Eastern Europe to identify and interdict the illegal movement of materials for weapons of mass destruction. Greg will be taking his analytical and editorial skills to a higher level, contributing to national-level policy and operational support analysis for these major international nonproliferation undertakings.

While we all selfishly wish Greg wouldn't move on, we are happy for him and are sure he will make a tremendous impact in his new position.

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.

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.