For over six years I have been espousing the virtues of 3D, stereo voice conversations with articles  and ITEXPO demonstrations mostly focusing on DiamondWare and the company's patented 3D technology which allows you to have a conference calls with others and place them on the left right, front or rear.

Until you have heard a conference call in 3D stereo, you have not heard a conference call.

In addition, the technology allows the addition of overtones like adding a metallic sound to a speaker or group of speakers on a conference call. This function could be useful if you are looking to find a way to discern what group a person belongs to -- the Los Angeles office for example.

You may recall that on May 15th of this year, I suggested Nortel would even buy DiamondWare. Well today is that day as Nortel did just that... They purchased the company and further explained how they have a portion of their R&D budget devoted to making VC-like investments but of course with a potentially different exit strategy.

Nortel believes the future of communications is likely going to be avatar-based and even if they are partially right -- let's say 5% of all calls, this could be a huge market.

A Nortel Avatar Demo of their web.alive business communications platform:


Nortel is further betting that the technology advantage they have as a result of this acquisition will help insulate them against others in the market who compete. That would be Avaya, Cisco and even to a lesser degree (at the moment) Microsoft. You see, I personally believe that 3D, stereo communications provides such a rich immersive experience that once you have tried it, you will have trouble going back to traditional telephony.

This move is the second acquisition in a few weeks for Nortel as they just picked up Pingtel as well. For the Canadian-based company these moves are bold as Nortel seems to be gaining momentum in the enterprise. Many of us are aware that most acquisitions fail and Nortel's past acquisitions have not seen success above industry averages.

What the company has done these past weeks though is buy easily digestible companies which are relatively cheap. These companies are M&A training wheels and if the company can get better at acquiring, it can present a more formidable resistance to the Cisco onslaught. Over the years, I have heard more than one story of how Cisco has acquired Nortel partners and damaged Nortel in the process.

In order for technology companies to compete effectively against Oracle and Cisco, they need to know how to acquire successfully. So for Nortel, the world is their oyster... They have the DiamondWare 3D technology and  are now a player in open source and have time to practice the M&A game.

How the company handles these two new companies will show me and others if they are able to successfully pull off more deals and become a bigger competitive threat to other industry players.

In the mean time, these moves should serve as a signal to competitors that Nortel seems to have gotten its mojo back and for customers, I suggest you join me in pushing Nortel to get DiamondWare technology into the company's entire product line ASAP.

See Also

Jon Arnold's take
Press Release

Two days -- two shows, two cities and two trains which left at dawn. Wow... What a rush. What I picked up from the Channel Partners (Boston) and SpeechTek (New York) shows is  the communications market and the call center market are doing well, based on what companies in the space tell me.

Yes, of course some sectors are doing better than others but some are amazingly strong... Open source anything for example is a good place to be. The speech market too is doing well as companies are looking to automation as a way to save money.


In addition, businesses have begun to realize the contact center is extending its presence within the entire corporation making almost all people within the company call center agents. Seems like Nadji Tehrani was right when many decades ago he proclaimed, Every Company is a Call Center.

As this happens the need to monitor quality by companies like Empirix grows and a conversation Susan Anderson at the company showed this to be the case.

A discussion with Jim Jenkins at IQ Services -- a communications testing company also confirms that the testing market is growing.

Discussions with Nuance were interesting as well, as the company seems to be transcending the world of speech and embracing a larger portion of the customer interaction pie. Not unlike Nortel, Cisco, West Interactive, IBM and others, the company is looking to capitalize on the growth of 3G devices and the convergence of outbound, inbound calling and voice portals.

Nuance is even helping companies design user interfaces which marry the best aspects of speech recognition and the GUI, allowing for example to tell a GPS device that you want to find a local Italian restaurant and rather than listen to 10 responses which you have to pick from, you see them on a screen and at this point can say, "Pick number 3".

My conversation with Nuance's Lynda Kate Smith and Michael Wehrs was very instructive and since Smith represents the call center line of business and Wehrs represents mobile, it was interesting to hear how technology developed in one area helps in other parts of the value chain. Our discussion even got into using speech on the device and within the network to interact with stored information in the cloud. For example telling your mobile phone to play music which could reside on your device or in the cloud and having the software be smart enough to figure out how to get the right information back to the user.

Voice biometrics too is gaining traction for things like password resets but I don't see this space as taking off -- rather it will grow slowly but surely and in the process, save companies tremendous support costs in areas like password resets and others.

What I am most excited about however is ITEXPO as I am seeing a resurgence in call centers and massive activity in the communications API space. This means that not only with ITEXPO have a very strong showing (early registration numbers show this to be the case) but the two simultaneous events, Communications Developer and Call Center 2.0 should also have nice attendance levels.

Remember that the purchase of Ribbit by BT has really legitimized communications APIs and development. We now see that major world power service providers are interested in extending their networks to developers everywhere and in doing so they will extend their importance in the new world of communications.

What communications will look like in five years is tough to know for sure but what I can tell you is the thought leaders in the communications and technology space will be at ITEXPO in a matter of weeks (September 16-18, 2008) in Los Angeles and if you want to know what is important in the market today and tomorrow so you can do your job more effectively, you should be there.

I hope to greet you all personally.

What is the future of communications? One acknowledged thought leader in our field is Thomas Howe and his consulting company which bears his name is the place you go when you want to know. Howe and I were recently on a panel together at a conference in San francisco and I was very impressed with what he had to say so I invited him to be be my guest on a podcast.

Some of the takeaways from our discussion are that voice mashups are becoming more common and voice will transcend CEBP or communications enabled business processes to the realm of the consumer as well. As this happens, communications becomes the condment to virtually all applications.

The excitement here is how this will happen. Who will be the winners and losers as communications ends up everywhere? Certainly BT sees this transformation and this is one of the reasons the company purchased Ribbit. Be sure to listen to Howe's perspective on how other service providers will respond.

If you are looking to learn more about the future of communications be sure to come to ITEXPO September 16-18, 2008 in Los Angeles and while you are there you can stop buy booths at the collocated Communications Developer Conference.

While you are there be sure to say Hi to Thomas and me as well. See you soon.

Behold the open source communications wars. In this corner weighing in at millions of downloads is Digium... A Huntsville, Alabama purveyor of all things Asterisk... From training to support to hardware, you name it.

In the other corner with decades of international experience and engineering and a strong alliance with IBM/Microsoft is Nortel/PingTel.

Last week we saw comments from Nortel on why they acquired PingTel and why this solution is better than the "old Asterisk".

One would imagine this comment was the straw that broke the camel's back:


Today, Digium's Bill Miller responds...

Blog Response for The Hyperconnected Enterprise Post

Presented with the disruptive threat of open source Asterisk, and the recent momentum seen in commercial channels and the enterprise, Nortel acquired sipXecs. Can you buy your way into open source credibility? Nortel's not the first old-line company to try. Is open source a marketing bullet point for Nortel ? Its certainly not inherent behavior that's woven into the fabric of the company!

Hey, I can't blame them -- if you were Nortel, and saw Digium and Asterisk on one side and Microsoft on the other, threatening to eat into your core business, what would you do?

So: Bravo, Nortel!  Welcome to the next generation of telephony. But you'll need to learn the strengths and limitations of what you just bought. As we have learned from our commercial customers as well as the countless numbers of Open Source Asterisk installations, SIP is not the entirety of UC. True, Asterisk isn't a SIP proxy -- because a SIP proxy alone cannot provide services the world has come to expect from phones.

To pick a specific example of the rather misleading comments in your article: It's incorrect when you claim that all Asterisk calls go through a centralized system. We assume you've just been misinformed, but your claim that Asterisk is designed to always handle media streams is just incorrect. You should recognize that the Asterisk rhetoric from the sipXecs and FreeSwitch teams refers to Asterisk over 4 years and several versions ago when they last looked at the feature set. In some cases, the Pingtel/sipXecs team in particular likes to compare against specific SMB packaged systems and not native Asterisk, which would provide a more "same page" comparison. The SCS500 scales to 500 users. It certainly does not need the power already in Asterisk today.

Let's talk real numbers. Asterisk community members have quickly created testbed platforms which process  300 SIP calls per second capacity. When RTP is managed by an Asterisk instance, we have demonstrated as many as 1900 concurrent  G.711 channels on inexpensive off-the-shelf hardware. The open source versions of Asterisk were designed to handle hundreds of thousands (yes, hundreds of thousands) of end users in different circumstances, spread across multiple machines with functional role distribution in a way completely unlike a PBX.  Of course, smaller SMB solutions are selling well for our Switchvox line as well as a dozen or more other companies who repackage Asterisk with limited hardware or license caps - that is their business.   But please be a bit more forthcoming in your comparisons - Asterisk is being run in systems spanning huge user PBX and service delivery populations.

For sipXecs to compare themselves against the pre-packaged SMB offerings of Asterisk in different flavors is misleading. That's like saying the Apache web server on my embedded-processor webcam can only handle 2 simultaneous streams, therefore Apache doesn't scale on any platform. So while Asterisk can serve as a PBX, it can (and for countless customers and projects already does) also serve as an incredibly flexible service-delivery platform for UC services, custom application development, or carrier VoIP integration. It can be used on even the smallest embedded platforms (Linksys WRT54G, AA50) or on the largest voice server farms such as Integrics' Enswitch which directly supports over 100,000 end points and over 6,000 concurrent calls just for one of their 40+ customers and integrates easily through Asterisk APIs to multiple billing solutions.

As the "wildcard" name suggests, Asterisk works with numerous protocols and codecs. When required for communication between disparate endpoints, Asterisk will intelligently negotiate and transcode between them. If the two are compatible, Asterisk will hand off the call and get out of the way. Asterisk has the flexibility of handling media if desired, but RTP between endpoints is the preferred design for larger systems, including video, which Asterisk has handled for several years now.

In contrast, the sipXecs architecture enforces the requirement that all endpoints be uniform, which pulls along all sorts of ugly forklift-upgrade requirements for businesses looking to grow into the future, or uses expensive media gateways to do what Asterisk can do in software. We can confidently say that Asterisk does UC and that sipXecs is simply a SIP platform that requires lots of other moving parts to get the job done. Don't take our word for it--read their comparison posts, which say sipXecs needs other components to complete their system. Asterisk handles the "U" in UC  (as well as the "C") and has for some time now.

The only claim that seems to be correct in Tony Rybczynski's post is that for large Asterisk installations, there is no comprehensive management interface for all possible aspects of the system.  There are multiple web-based interfaces available for small/medium enterprise PBX-style installations - FreePBX is the most popular open source tool, and Digium's Switchvox being an excellent representative of a commercial packaging. Both of these examples include automatic phone configuration and provisioning.  However, Digium has found that large enterprise developers who wish to harness the true power of the system typically want to have call control at a much more fundamental level than what a GUI typically offers or what a vendor might consider "simplified." Therefore, Asterisk is available as a telephony toolkit - a suite of programs and fundamental tools that allows a developer to quickly deploy new voice apps or extend existing legacy platforms if they so choose - it is as flexible as the circumstances require.

One final observation counterpoint to a comment you made: As the progenitors of the venerable DMS-100, Nortel should know by now that the age of code -- or lines of source -- mean nothing when compared against other software. Do more lines of code indicate more features or quality? Do fewer lines evidence efficient, bug-free code? Lines of code are typically irrelevant in doing anything other than measuring platforms against themselves over time or measuring individual coding productivity.

It's going to take more than this acquisition to, as Tony says, solidify Nortel's "leadership in the global open source ecosystem." We hope that this purchase creates a more viable and useful application that can be used by the open source community - we hope this isn't a repeat of the Vovida(Vocal)/Cisco purchase and subsequent smothering. But for the sake of the open source telephony movement that Digium started, Nortel, we welcome you to the open source revolution.

Tata's View of Communications

Tata is a global company which is perhaps closest to what General Electric is in the US or Siemens is in Germany. The company is absolutely massive, having over 5,000 employees and engages in businesses such as building cars, providing chemicals, energy, materials and even consumer products like tea.

In addition, the company is a major player in telecom and has a global fiber network which is worth taking note of as it is large and growing. Tata has been aggressively pursuing US and international business and for this reason I knew my audience would be interested in learning more about how Tata Communications can help service providers, schools, the government and other US based concerns solve their communications problems.

On a podcast interview with Anthony Rossabi, Vice President of Carrier Services for the Americas I had a chance to ask questions about what the company is up to and how it can help carriers worldwide.

A good deal of our discussion centered around TCTS or Tata Communications Transformation Services which provides specific back office functions for carriers such as provisioning, network design, access and access pricing. The company has been focusing on landline but is moving into the wireless space as well.

In addition to what is happening in the US, the company is also growing in developed markets and moving aggressively in emerging markets. Beyond India, they have also created strong inroads into South Africa and China with equity stake arrangements in Neotel and China Enterprise Communications.

The company is also growing its MPLS platform in Latin America through a partnership and building out a POP (Point of Presence) in Brazil.

The company is also exploring green initiatives by potentially working with the Green Grid and other similar groups.

TCTS is gaining traction according to Rossabi by helping carriers increase efficiency and save money. For more information check out tatacommunications.com.

Tata Communications Global MPLS Network

The open source world of communications is growing rapidly. Recently I discussed the Nortel acquisition of PingTel and what this means for our markets.

Ironically the competition in open source was once between Digium and PingTel and when Asterisk became the the dominant player in the space, it seemed that Digium won the war. It turns out that while PingTel lost steam, a new wave of compeitors in the open source space emerged, basing their products on Asterisk.

One such company is Fonality and their Trixbox platform has become a popular alternative in the open source space. It just so happens that Fonality is collocating their training session in Los Angeles at ITEXPO in a  few weeks.

If you are looking to see all the communications companies that matter in the market and also get a chance to receive certification on a number of topics, be sure to come to the show. As you probably know by now, TMC does not play favorites and we are open to working with many companies on their certification prgrams.

Here are the details of the the Trixbox program and a link to TMC University courses as well:

FtOCC CE FtOCC Technician  trixbox Training Courses Return to ITEXPO West Why Get FtOCC Certified? Get FtOCC certified to get prepared to make money with trixbox. Take FtOCC CE to sell and install trixbox and FtOCC Tech to support and troubleshoot trixbox. Get certified and get the cost of training back in your pocket: knowledge from the experts, demo kit with licenses to become your own export, and discounts on licenses and support! Product Discounts By attending FtOCC, you will automatically qualify for reseller discounts on trixbox Pro licenses and support. Now, get certified and start increasing your margins - instantly! Review the descriptions below then select the best course for you and register today!   FtOCC CE (trixbox CE)   FtOCC CE FtOCC CE is a 2.5-day course designed to teach the basics of trixbox® CE installation and administration. FtOCC CE is a great opportunity to roll up your sleeves and learn the ins and outs of trixbox CE. This course is designed for those who wish to install trixbox CE systems for their company or their clients, people who will have to maintain a trixbox installation, or users who are relatively new to trixbox and who want a better understanding of its capabilities. Learn More: Course Description Course Objectives FtOCC CE Agenda Course Requirements September 16-18, 2008 Los Angeles Convention Center Los Angeles, CA   FtOCC Technician (trixbox CE, Pro and PBXtra)     FtOCC Tech FtOCC Technician is a three-day technical certification course designed to train resellers and consultants to support their clients running trixbox CE, trixbox Pro, and PBXtra systems. Taught by Fonality technical support instructors and designed for Linux system administrators, FtOCC Technician dives deep into platform and application installation, carrier setup and integration, network configuration, echo causes and remedies, and other common issues. Learn More: Course Description Course Objectives FtOCC Technician Agenda Course Requirements September 16-18, 2008 Los Angeles Convention Center Los Angeles, CA

The VoIP opportunity is still huge according to a new report from Infonetics Research. At a time when many industries are really hurting, hosted VoIP and managed IP PBX services grew 53% to $24 billion in 2007 after surging 66% in 2006.

Obviously much of this growth is as a result of PSTN replacement but it should be noted that once IP is in place, the potential to add services increases greatly. The great news is Infonetics anticipates growth in the strong double-digits until at least 2011.

Interestingly, IP communications boosts productivity and saves money at the same time. This makes it a great technology to invest in when times are good and times are bad.

Sadly, many companies get the deer in the headlights feeling when they see an economy slow and they sometimes stick with the status quo instead of making decisions which will save them money, boost performance and generate rapid ROI.

Interestingly I have noticed an increased focus on contact center and CRM solutions these past months which leads me to believe companies have finally figured out that if you serve your customers efficiently and well, you make more money.

Contrast this to the last slowdown in 2000 when companies decided to offshore their call centers to save money. This resulted in many cases with worse service and some companies were forced to bring their call centers back into the states.

I am very curious to see how this year shapes up in terms of IP communications growth. Internationally it is certainly on fire but in the US we need to see just how many companies were staring into those headlights.

Please enjoy some communications and technology stories while having your morning (or evening) tea or coffee. My thoughts in brief -- Extreme is smart to jump on the energy efficient bandwagon, Jajah claims to have over 10 million users in the story below which is substantial. They also have a service which translates short English phrases to Chinese. Very cool but I am not sure this can be monetized.

Virtual PBX now allows callers to be pulled out of voicemail -- this great news and not easy to pull off for a hosted vendor. BTW, Virtual PBX was years ahead of the competition in this market but they are being rapidly eclipsed by companies that started years after they did but focused on building their brands. The company should be the Avaya of the hosted communications space.

I was just up to see PAETEC last week and Tim Gray who wrote the PAETEC story was with me. There is insight in Tim's article not found elsewhere.

Another story worth mentioning is Gartner recognizing Digium. Digium really doesn't need the recognition as they already had millions of people download their software before many of the analysts realized what they were doing. Still, corporate decision makers like to have blessings from analysts to keep them from getting fired for making bad decisions. This story is good news for Digium and hats off to Gartner for recognizing the growing momentum of open-source communications solutions.

The last article here focuses on Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his Cramer interview on CNBC. First of all, many people have commented to me that Cramer acted buffoonish during the interview while Schmidt was polished and professional. As challenging as Cramer is to watch at times, his style has caused thousands (millions?) to take a serious interest in investing. For this he should be given great credit but in the end should everyone be investing their own money? We will leave this discussion for another day. For his part, Schmidt was polished and quite matter-of-fact and even acknowledged Google is not perfect.


I did catch him saying in the interview that his company is not responsible for the loss of revenue at companies like the New York times as his company sends them so much traffic. This is true but half the story. News aggregation services such as those supplied by Google do allow companies with far less reach and quality coverage to compete on a semi-level playing field with the New York Times.

Depending on perspective, this could be good or bad. But the fact that Google sits between customers and media sites means they have wrestled at least some control from media companies. In some ways the search giant is responsible for audience amplification... If your site does well -- Google makes it do better. If your site does not do well, Google ensures few will visit it. perhaps this is the role they should play.

•  XO Communications Debuts Ethernet Hub Service for Carriers
•  Locus Telecommunications Expands Distribution Coverage of S Card
•  JAJAH Announces PC-Free VoIP Calls in Mexico
•  Extreme Networks Joins the Green Grid
•  Successful Tests Conducted on Dutch SIP Exchange Project
•  IPLogic Receives Recertification as Cisco Gold Certified Partner
•  Polycom Brings VoIP Field Verified Program to Asia Pacific
•  Virtual PBX Intros Voicemail Interrupt
•  Nortel Unified Communications Enhances Productivity for the Bank of Panhsin
•  KT Chooses Acme Packet SBCs for International VoIP Peering Service
•  PAETEC: Revenues Up, Profits Down
•  Nortel Acquires Pingtel, Eyes Open Source UC Market for SMBs
•  Digium Drives Open Source VoIP, Named Corporate Telephony Visionary by Gartner
• Report: VoIP Service Revenue Up in 2007
• PacketVideo: Video on a Cell Phone Turns 10
• Broadband in the U.K. Still Ahead of Forecast
• CEO Eric Schmidt Discusses Future of Google on CNBC

It has been pretty shocking to me to see that the Bush Administration did not embrace technology in a more grand fashion. After all, Vice President Al Gore was so enthusiastic about the Internet he even claimed to invent it.

So while it seems like the companies of importance in the Bush administration have to do with energy, commodities and defense, we may see a McCain presidency focusing at least a little on technology.

In fact there will be a 10% R&D tax credit and opposition to internet taxes. In addition there will be an increase in H1-B visas (thankfully). McCain does not think we should have federal net neutrality laws -- the FCC and other regulators should deal with these issues he believes.

See this New York Times article for more.

Many attendees have told me they are getting great deals on airfare to ITEXPO September 16-18, 2008. I happened to just price a flight and the cost was $306. Travelocity has a sale with prices from New York to Los Angeles starting at $285.

Also, many people have told me they will be using JetBlue and landing in Long Beach and Burbank Airports.

Here is a United flight I priced as a reference:

	Flight:	United flight 21 on a Boeing 757 Jet
	Depart:	New York-Kennedy, NY (JFK)- Tue, Sep 16 6:30am
	Arrive:	Los Angeles, CA (LAX) - Tue, Sep 16 9:44am
	Flight:	United flight 840 on a Boeing 757 Jet
	Depart:	Los Angeles, CA (LAX)- Thu, Sep 18 2:14pm
	Arrive:	New York-Kennedy, NY (JFK) - Thu, Sep 18 10:38pm

The great news is that flight costs are dropping pretty rapidly meaning you can come the world's communications event and still have reasonable travel costs. If you are looking to select or deploy communications equipment in the next 18 months you have to be at this show. If you want to network with the entire IP communications industry at once (including the most important analysts and press members), you need to be at the show.

I hope to see you there. I will be personally greeting everyone.