Communications and Technology Blog - Tehrani.com - IP Communications Archives

Avaya Takes Networking Lead in SPB

2013-05-15T22:19:19Z

At Interop Las Vegas 2013 Avaya was demonstrating their real-world Shortest Path Bridging (SPB) solutions and while interoperating with Spirent, HP and Alcatel-Lucent. Many of you will remember when Avaya was actually the enterprise division of Lucent before the company spun off just over twelve years ago. Randy Cross the company’s director of PLM discussed how there is a rapid move to software in the networking market and SPB is an evolution of MPLS allowing services to be created dynamically on the server where the applications reside or on the switches nearest the users.

This is one of the main benefits of SPB in-fact… It allows customers to simplify network creation and management by requiring service provisioning only at the edge of the network. Avaya thinks the new protocol has a bright future as it saves time, effort, and reduces human error by dynamically building and maintaining the network topology between nodes using intermediate system to intermediate system (IS-IS), a carrier-grade link state protocol. Another benefit lies in its ability to establish a multi-path fabric for traffic distribution and subsequently maximize bandwidth utilization on all paths while being able to execute seamless, sub-second network changes.

The company showed multicast over SPB utilizing its VSP 4000 multiservice edge switch and later demonstrated a sub 200 millisecond failover to me in their booth. I can’t vouch for the actual speed of the failover recovery as I didn’t have a stopwatch but it seemed quite rapid.

Cross told me using this technology and the VSP4000, you can extend the service enabling fabric to the edges of the network supporting a distributed enterprise.

He further explained that they deployed this technology with video surveillance company Pelco and were able to show that SPB provided three times better performance than IP multicast (PDF) without needing to reset the IP cameras frequently.

Another big benefit of this technology is building metro area networks (pictured) where a data center can have VSP 7000s or VSP 9000s while the VSP 4000 can sit in the basement of a building providing all the benefits of MPLS with security and isolation at a lower cost. This can be as simple as having a few engineers lighting up the metros quickly with fiber to the building and a truck roll to deploy the box he explained.

Other benefits of this solution include simple commands of a few words to allow services to come up quickly between nodes as well as the ability to transfer virtual machines rapidly between the gear of various equipment vendors.

Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst, ZK Research had this to say about the news, "These four vendors coming together to showcase SPB interoperability in a public forum such as Interop is significant. In comparison to alternative fabric technologies, SPB offers more vendor support, offers greater scaling and has implementations which are closer to the actual standards – facilitating this type of interoperability testing. Companies that are looking to virtualize data centers and reduce network complexity need to consider an approach based on Shortest Path Bridging."

Alianza Wants to Host Your Software Telco

2013-05-14T21:33:33Z

The software telco(r)evolution representing the move from hardware to software is perhaps the biggest trend in the world of carrier telecom this decade. Whenever we see such disruption in a market, it becomes an opportunity for new entrants to displace existing companies. As you may recall, Sonus Networks and Acme Packet (now Oracle) were just a few companies which were born and prospered during the transition from circuit to packet switched carrier networks.

In the past I have written about Metaswitch and their software telco solutions through NFV or network functions virtualization and their open-source Project Clearwater initiative which allows a carrier to run IMS on standard servers for free.

In both instances the company has shown leadership in the move to software which runs a telco. Another company I consider a software telco pioneer is Alianza. I wrote about them in 2011 when they announce d a deal with Clearwire to provide the company with hosted voice solutions.

I spoke with Kevin Mitchell the company’s Vice President of Marketing, about his company today and this is what you should know. Alianza has a relationship with Level 3 Communications who provides the termination, origination and wholesale services while the company provides a cloud-based voice platform. He says the company provides everything a voice service provider would need to buy, build or manage. In fact the two companies are working together to provide customers with the Level 3 Carrier Cloud Voice Solution. He continued that this could apply to a green field situation or even a migration to IMS.

The concept of “software telco” is a move from “bespoke or custom” hardware to software – there really is no reason why the solution can’t live a cloud and be delivered as a service. In fact, Mitchell tells me that his company embraces much of the concepts embodied in NFV… He says they run their own software and leverage VMware and HP servers for session management, applications and features.

Kevin further explained that a service provider using Alianza instead of hosting their own equipment wouldn’t have to deal with the CAPEX associated with the servers and other equipment needed to run the network. In fact they would just need to provide the CPE such as ATAs, soft clients or IP phones and pay Alianza as they grow. He also said that not all of his customers have the budget for SIP, VoIP and IMS expertise and as a result they turn to his company so they can in-turn focus on improving their video services and broadband speeds.

Moreover, he touted the company’s 350 web methods for integration and control functionality allowing smooth back office, customer care and billing integration. He also explained that carriers aren’t locked into preset calling/service plans… They have complete control of how their customers receive and are billed for the service they receive.

A wave of cloud-based companies are providing enterprises with cloud-based services from payroll to CRM and call recording. To date, communications service providers haven’t had many options to choose from in this area and the nature of their business dictated in many cases that they manage everything themselves.

With the advent of NFV, carriers told equipment providers that they wanted to be able to design their networks in the same way an enterprise designs its data center… Using virtualized software running on OTS servers. As this transition continues, there is no reason why a carrier shouldn’t or wouldn’t consider working with a cloud-based provider for their IMS services as well.

After all, if you are going to become a software telco, you have to explore what the benefits are of controlling all of the software yourself. Why not get a head start and host your services from a carrier that exists already, providing you APIs and referenceable customers? This of course is the vision Alianza hopes many carriers will continue to consider when evaluating their software telco options.

Be sure to learn everything there is to know about NFV and the birth of the software telco at Software Telco Congress, Nov 19-21, 2013 in Santa Clara, Ca.

Metaswitch Clearwater: Game Changing Open Source IMS Initiative

2013-05-08T12:20:23Z

The march to a software telco world is progressing nicely

Communications service providers are at war with OTT providers and need to ensure they are able to battle on as level a playing field as possible. There are significant costs associated with running a major telco and hardware infrastructure certainly ranks high among them. Sure, OTT providers like Skype and WhatsApp have infrastructure costs as well but they often leverage standard servers and software to achieve their goals. Contrast this to a telecom operator who typically buys proprietary equipment from a number of specialized manufacturers. The difference in costs between these approaches is quite steep.

This is of course is why carriers are pushing equipment providers to provide all of the network functions they supply in software which will run in virtualized instances on off-the-shelf servers. It also explains what ETSI network functions virtualization or NFV is all about and Metaswitch Networks has been on the forefront of this trend and hopes to ride the wave into larger carriers worldwide.

To further this push from hardware into software, the company recently announced Project Clearwater which takes the components of IMS and runs them on standard servers in an open-source manner. A number of carriers have leveraged open-source Asterisk in the past to provide telephony service to their customers, now they and others can take advantage of this new initiative to provide open-source IMS as well.

One of the main reasons carriers want to shift their network functions to software is it allows them to select products from a wider variety of vendors. The reason has to do with the costs of developing telephony hardware for carriers. You need phenomenally deep pockets and lots of patience to sell to carriers as an upstart hardware provider. As a result, an amazing number of equipment companies have gone belly up waiting to become adopted by telcos worldwide. Software on the other hand has less cost associated with it meaning a potentially higher likelihood of success.

Still, telcos can never be too cautious choosing a company to base their network on. One of the benefits of going with an open-source project is you no longer need to worry about one company to support it.

I spoke at length with CTO Martin Taylor and he tells me they learned a great deal from the efforts of many of the players in the social networking and cloud space and took the best ideas from these players and applied them to a SIP centric IMS network. Some things they learned and applied were using DNS as a load balancing technique as well as building massively scalable and resilient solutions in a low-cost manner.

How low cost you ask? Well, I am glad you did. Taylor says about 2 cents per subscriber per year based on the costs of AWS. Of course the solution is not dependent on Amazon, but this is just a guideline to consider. Moreover, this cost covers core plumbing of voice, video and messaging… You would still need an SBC, telephony app servers, messaging app servers and media gateways.

He further explained that carriers who are looking to deploy RCS know they have compete with OTT providers and being able to lower the cost of IMS is a huge help in doing so.

Metaswitch will supply support and bug fixes for the project. Taylor exclaimed, “Charging for peace of mind really is what it boils down to.” This and supplying additional solutions is how the company hopes to monetize this new initiative which is free for telcos to use.

This news is a potential game changer for telecom. Carriers once had to grapple with whether to purchase their IMS solutions from the US, Europe or Chinese equipment providers… Now they have the option of trying a software-centric, open-source approach. They can even try this solution in tandem with other trials going on in their labs.

Be sure to learn everything there is to know about NFV and the birth of the software telco at Software Telco Congress, Nov 19-21, 2013 in Santa Clara, Ca.

GENBAND Perspectives 2013 Live Blog

2013-04-30T13:06:04Z

Check out What's on Tap for the GENBAND Perspectives Summit? by TMCnet's Rich Steeves

See me live at 2:00 pm today here at GENBAND Perspectives 2013 where I speak on a panel "Harnessing the Power of Social Networking" in the Grand Cypress Ballroom here at the Hyatt Regecy Grand Cypress.

I am in Orlando for GENBAND Perspectives 2013 and the show is about to begin. last night there was a poolside reception which was rained out - but the venue was able to move about 1,000 people quickly indoors where the reception continued without a hitch. OK, a few of us had some wet clothes but other than that things have gone well so far.

Drummers kick off event

GENBAND Chairman David Walsh takes the stage. "Digital life is interactive. We are constantly interacting with it. None of it can happen without secure digital networks." Will companies, lead, follow or get run over? They have to decide he said.

General discussion about how many new domain names are registered... How many emails are sent - how much of it is spam (hint: almost all), how many people are on the Internet, etc.

He segued into a discussion of OpenTable and Uber - apps which don't use people but they facilitate transactions between buyers and sellers for restaurants and car services. 1 in 8 married couples met online he continued.

He made a funny telecom joke - if you got hear early, you could use SinglesAroundMe to find a date and then use Uber to get a car and OpenTable for a restaurant location - this is the new triple play.

He also discussed WhatsApp and Viber - he uses and loves both. He mentioned these OTT services are great but not ubiquitous. GENBAND is developing tech to allow these services to be federated.

Discussion moved to WiFi - he discussed the law of wireless gravity - bits will find their way to lowest cost infrastructure as fast as possible. "Spectrum is constrained and expensive. We can use math and science to make it more efficient but it isnt as effective as fiber which you can deploy more of to add capacity."

New York will become a carrier by converting phone booths to wireless hotspots - they will be able to become an ad agency and deliver content to various geographies and generate revenue. Hotels are also telecom carriers because networks are built where people gather and vice versa.

Discussion of how much heat is generated by data centers - they are power an water hogs (for cooling). Intertech is their partner and they provide more efficient cooling solutions.

We are beginning to see the start of cyber-warfare they also have an investment in Mandiant - the company finds and remediates problems. Also they are working with ISC8 to help find faults before they happen because quite often you find a threat 40 months after the intruder got into your network.

Devices are more valuable than ever. We want to help you [carriers] become a vital part of this evolution.

Charlie Vogt President and CEO takes stage

Discussion of the pace of change, GENBAND success - growth, speed of growth and forecasts of future growth. 80 of top 100 service providers are their customers. They are a hug part of Verizon FiOS, BT, Shaw, NTT, Telus and a number of other carriers. At CIBC and University of Texas at Austin - they are providing significant telecom infrastructure.

We are watching a video about how GENBAND empowers service providers and enterprises - by boosting scalability, efficiency and profitability - "Making Networks Smarter."

$100M annually in R&D is invested by the company. Small cells, WebRTC and cloud are a few areas of these investments.

Verizon CTO Tony Melone takes stage starts off - tech can build a better future... Together with partners we will take on societal challenges, healthcare, public safety, education, etc. Gave example of a wireless telepresence robot to allow remote students to learn. Also, "Make the world more sustainable and improve healthcare and remake entertainment with state of the art infrastructure which delivers superior experience consumers want."

Apps have to run on secure, reliable, available infrastructure - this is the vision at Verizon. We strive to deliver this day in and day out. 4 platforms.

4G/LTE - largest footprint in US and world... We achieve speeds faster than advertised today. US is ahead of world in 4G - thanks to our competitors trying to catch us.

IP - important in everything we do

FiOS - our Quntum services offers 300 mbps to consumers - soon we will offer 1 gbps if they need it. Reminds us we constantly underestimate tech needs/growth.

Cloud: Terremark: this is an important part of our portfolio.

We built 4G on 700 mhz spectrum and will put AWS to use soon. We need more spectrum and will go out an get it as needed. He doesn't understand why some want to limit telco access to spectrum.Explained the company is using the spectrum it acquires - it doesn't shelve it. It is investing billions in spectrum build-out in-fact. Won't launch before it is ready- it is not trivial to build a nationwide VoLTE/wireless VoIP network.

Video is 50% of global traffic on backbone some estimate as high as 90% in not too distant future.

Gave shout out to GENBAND, Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent and others who allow them to provide more cost-effective services.

Moved to smart-home discusion - FiOS - PON - 18M homes, mid-30% penetration roughly. 150 HD channels and reminded us up to 300 mbps to the home. They will migrate the backbone from 2.5 Gbps to 40 gbps and when this happens, they can provide 1 gbps to home.

In their broadband home router - they want to add intelligence so new devices can connect quickly and then connect to the cloud without user set up. They want to mak it easier for consumers to get access to the latest technology.

They see FiOS more as a business play - allows them to enhance their investment in the asset. They are being aggressive in moving from copper to fiber. Will accelerate this move based on what they learned in Hurricane Sandy.

"Cloud is real and growth continues... Means different things to different people." They focus on enterprises - secure connections to cloud with a breadth of services. Managed apps and services...

Thinks their platform will be ideal for partners to build upon. This is how they want to help solve the challenges in the world.

He then showed a video - some of it is below:

We enable so much of what is possible with innovation - we shouldn't forget how important we are - we need to continue building trust with customers - provide reliable networks etc.

M2M 40% growth - 50B devices by 2020 to be connected - partnership with QUALCOMM, Mphase - make it easy to take non-traditional devices - connect to Verizon Wireless network.

How can we make tech make the lives of our customers better and improve societal issues like healthcare.

Tim Wagner of Samsung takes the stage to discuss the company's transformation of the last three years - how the company has become a smartphone leader from a feature phone leader... Said no other company has done this. Largest electronics company in world... $200B organization. Selling 1,500 devices per minute.

Talked about how their commercials made their competition seem like the device was for old people - basically talking about Apple and the ads where Samsung users wet to the lines where Apple customers were waiting to buy.

Now discussed how much their social media presence has grown. Also - discussed hoe 500+ customers launched the Galaxy S4 phone at once. Around 120-125M Galaxy devices have been deployed. This doesn't count TVs appliances, feature-phones and other devices.

Discussed Samsung SAFE for enterprise - connects device to MS Exchange and ActiveSync, on device encryption, VPN support, MDM support from AirWatch etc.

Says they have systematically defragmented Android - makes the devices consistent across carriers and form factors and price points. IT manager can test one device and add SAFE - not each device.

26 devices run SAFE today.

Gave case study examples of successes.

AA has 16,800 Galaxy Note devices - allows American Airlines to provide same level of service to top First or Business Class. Their business is transformed - no more manuals or paper tickets.

Helping customers with tech implants - heart issues - allows them to know if they have heart problems through app on phone. First tablet approved for cockpits in US. DISH Networks - reducing four-hour window, use Galaxy Note to track installers and reroute them based on success at install. Allows them to check reception from top of ladder - don't need to go back down to test repeatedly. Can upsell and gt an electronic signature. Takes a four-hour window to potentially a 90-minute window - changes their business.

65,000 unit Galaxy win at HP.

Moved to discuss Samsung Knox - starts from metal of device to software... Allows work/life balance - keeps you from losing personal photos when enterprise wipes your device.

When turned on - looks for Samsung OS - if it doesn't find one, it will not boot up. Worked with NSA on this - security enhanced Android. Any unapproved apps are deleted/killed. General Dynamics is selling these to the government. They decided to focus on Government realizing that other regulated industries will follow.

Also have a container for business and personal use.

We have the most number of smart devices that are out there he said.
education, healthcare, manufacturing, hospitality and other vertical solutions are their focus going forward.

Samsung and GENBAND collaboration - enhance productivity, anytime, anywhere access to data - creating "Smarter Office." Discussed better business value.

He gave an example of allowing you to tap a phone to a tablet and being able to transfer a all from your office to your mobile device so you can listen to your conference call on the way home and spend more time with your family. Then explained they think GENBAND is the ideal partner to help them provide all this value to the market.

Samsung has an Oprah Moment - everyone in the audience gets a Samsung Galaxy Note 2 - now that is amazing!

This concludes the live blog for now - I am about to prepare for my talk in a few hours - right after the lunch break.

Dialogic Fuels Networks, Augments WebRTC

2013-02-28T00:23:01Z

Having covered Dialogic for about two decades I can tell you they were an integral player in the converging world of communications and technology. When you leave a voicemail, call into a call center or benefit from a telecom advancement quite often a Dialogic product is involved by providing an interface and performing some sort of processing behind the scenes.

After rolling up much of the competitive space and other telecom vendors as well, the company found itself in a situation where much of its core business was being eliminated as many of the tasks you once needed proprietary boards to handle could be taken care of through software on ever-more powerful Intel CPUs.

If this challenge wasn't enough of an issue, Asterisk made it easy to have a standardized base of solutions to build on top of when looking to solve the problems you once had to rely exclusively on Dialogic to provide.

In response to this pressure the company has relaunched itself with a new branding campaign titled "Network Fuel" which is designed to remind carriers the company can help it solve a myriad of networking challenges for them.

Andrew Goldberg, Dialogic Senior VP of Strategy & Marketing proudly stands in front of signs depicting thee company's rebranding efforts

Andrew Goldberg, the company's Senior VP of Strategy & Marketing took me through the company's new reorganized product line but started by saying the goal of the company is to make networks better. The three pillars of the Network Fuel paradigm are as follows:

Any to any networking/interconnection which includes gateways, control switch, SBCs, session-management, signaling management which allows for roaming, etc.

Network congestion - which is a rebrand of bandwidth optimization. They refer to this new area as "amplifying capacity" which includes VoIP, video and more recently, data. He explains that Dialogic has new products coming which will sit in network core and backhaul, optimize and amplify capacity - even if the data is currently optimized. He says carriers can build more network or deploy the company's technology and amplify what they have. He says the ROI gets even better in developing markets where backhaul is handled by satellite and microwave. "Capacity is at a premium," he emphasized. He continued to say their solutions are a better CAPEX and OPEX solution.

Finally there is application enablement which as you may recall harkens back to the company's long-history of being the underlying technology of the app-gen business of the 1990s which allowed developers for the first time to use a GUI to write telecom applications. Sure, this seems like its no big deal now but when you consider PBXs and central office switches of the time wouldn't imagine the concept of open APIs on their systems, you see why Dialogic's entry into the open telecom space was a game-changer.

Speaking of game-changing this is what he said about WebRTC - the company knows this is a huge area of opportunity and envisions having its PowerMedia solutions be the integration layer allowing additions like voicemail, video-mail, collaboration, multi-party-conferencing, call recording and more. He said in fact PowerMedia as a software media server fits in the middle and turns WebRTC into something people want "beyond a novelty."

The reason this is interesting has to do with the IP telephony space which first emerged in the late 1990s. As some of you recall, in 1997 I went to the then-prevalent COMDEX trade show to tell people my company, TMC was about to launch a magazine called Internet Telephony. The reaction was unanimous - why do we need a magazine on a hobbyist toy? They may as well have called it a "novelty" right?

What most didn't see coming was a thriving IP telephony/VoIP gateway business enabled by companies providing boards and software such as Dialogic. It turns out, it only took a few modifications to adapt current boards used in voicemail systems to handle real-time IP communications. From there, the calling card market started to adopt VoIP and we soon saw IP-based PBX and ACD solutions emerge. Amazingly this simple concept of transporting communications over IP is responsible for the FCC discussing the sunsetting of the PSTN or traditional telephone network later this decade.

The point is WebRTC as Goldberg describes it sounds exactly like the VoIP market when it emerged more than 15 years ago. Will it be as big? Bigger? No one knows for sure but Dialogic is once again positioning itself to be in the middle of the action - "fueling" not only your network but development efforts as investors, developers, carriers, web portals and start-ups try to strike it rich in this new and exciting market.

To learn more about WebRTC see the recent TMC webinar Dialogic recently held on the matter and visit them live at WebRTC Conference & Expo in Atlanta, June 25-27, 2013.

Volubill Updates Charging and Policy Solutions at MWC2013

2013-02-25T18:54:32Z

Volubill the "converged charging and policy" company brought their solutions up to date at Mobile World Congress 2013 with the introduction of 4G LTE solutions. One of the interesting differentiators the company provides is allowing carriers to personalize virtually anything. For example, customer Orange Madagascar recently launched 18 new packages and will soon launch another 14. Each took 15 minutes to configure, test and deploy. Examples of such packages could be gaming or even Spotify where a users could have unlimited Spotify minutes included in their bundle.

Another area of growth is WiFi-offload where carriers can use the company's solutions to provide tracking of these minutes. Moreover the company also allows carriers to deal with EU regulations coming in July of 2014 related to local break-out which means carriers in a local country will be able to become the customer's predominant carrier while the user is in their jurisdiction.

In other words if you have a carrier in the UK, when you get to Paris, you will be able to choose from any wireless carrier in the country you just entered. Currently all data traffic is funneled back to the carrier in the users home-area. John Aalbers the company's CEO (above) explains that carriers have now started to offer inexpensive daily roaming packages to roaming customers to eliminate bill shock and possibly make this new law a non-issue.

Volubill's solutions will enable local carriers to track and bill these temporary customers.

John says the company is about connecting the revenue model of its customers with usage models. In other words they are trying to line up the value provided with revenue charged. "The goal here is to provide the right service with the right quality at the right price," he says. The company hopes to be at the center of helping wireless carriers provide future services in a profitable manner.

WebRTC Advisory Board Announced

2013-02-20T20:02:08Z

One of the more exciting bits of news this week has to do with TMC and partners choosing the Inaugural WebRTC advisory board. After the huge success of the first WebRTC World show in Santa Clara, California, we wanted to make sure we worked with the absolute top minds in the communications, technology and WebRTC fields to ensure our conferences have the best content possible.

The next show takes place June 25-27, 2013 in Atlanta, GA. Here is a list of the new board members with Twitter handles for easy-following purposes.

Update: Jim Donovan's correct Twitter handle is now listed below.

Name/Company	Member Handle	Company Handle
Jim Donovan Acme Packet	@jdrtc	@Acme_Packet
Tsahi Levent-Levi Amdocs	@tsahil	@Amdocs
Alan Johnston Avaya	@alanbjohnston	@Avaya
Chris McGugan Avaya	@cmcgugan	@Avaya
Arnaud Budkiewicz Bistri	@arnaudbud	@Bistri
Cullen Jennings Cisco	@cfluffy	@CiscoSystems
Steven Sokol Digium	@ssokol	@digium
David Duffett Asterisk	@dduffett	‏ @asteriskpbx
Dean Bubley Distruptive Analysis	@disruptivedean	@DApremium
Geoff Hollingworth Ericsson	@geoffworth	@ericsson
Craig Walker Fierspotter Labs	@cwalker123	N/A
Jan Linden Google	@jtlinden	@google
Justin Uberti Google	@juberti	@google
Stephen Brown Mitel	@mitelcloudchief	@mitel
Boris Selitser Oracle	N/A	@Oracle
Joe Burton Plantronics	@JoeBurtonCTO	@Plantronics
Goncalo Morais Siemens	@gnclmorais	@SiemensEnt
Mohan Palat Sonus	@mpalat	@sonusnet
Mark Weidick TenHands	@markweidick	@TenHandsInc
David Jodoin ThruPoint	@david_jodoin	@Thrupoint
Dan Burnett Voxeo	@voxeodanburnett	@voxeo
Alexey Aylarov Zingaya	@aylarov	@Zingaya_Service

Thoughts on Alcatel-Lucent

2013-02-08T19:42:16Z

One of the greatest challenges incumbent companies face is the ambivalence and corporate politics incumbency breeds and it only gets worse in what we call the age of acceleration where competitors arise faster and technologies shift more quickly than ever. Nortel, NSN and Alcatel-Lucent are all companies who enjoyed decades of leadership in the carrier market and in the process decided to provide generous benefits for their workers which would eventually help make them uncompetitive.

There is more to it - in the late nineties, Lucent acquired companies so quickly that its workers didn't know exactly who did what. Nortel too made a great deal of acquisitions. The challenge for both companies was they didn't integrate their new assets into their companies effectively.

Cisco on the other hand was a master of buying companies with good technology and rapidly rolling the products out to its global salesforce allowing sales of the acquired companys' products to accelerate rapidly. To some degree they play an arbitrage game of taking a good local technology and providing it globally with a solid salesforce.

Few other companies have mastered the art of the acquisition like Cisco.

When Alcatel decided to Merge with Lucent Technologies the competition told me privately that the merger would take a few years to integrate well and then the new entity would be a force to reckon with. There was certainly much to look forward to - the merger of the best of US and french technology. In reality - the way things have been going lately, some have said the Franco-American company with power bases in New Jersey and France resembles the offspring of Snooki and Pepe Le Pew.

Of course this is why Alcatel-Lucent recently announced that CEO Ben Verwaayen will be stepping down.

On the financial front, ALU just reported a net loss of $1.85 billion for 2012. The explanation was that it has been suffering from lower than expected sales in Europe and China and it took a write-down in its wireless and optics businesses.

Highlights from the earnings release:

Sales fell 5.7 percent to $19.3 billion in 2012.
Adjusted operating profit was $156.6 million.
Margin of 2.9 percent was below the 5-9 percent Verwaayen had promised.
Cash was depleted $908.6 million in 2012.
Fourth quarter sales fell 1.3 percent from a year earlier as only the U.S. market was strong

The net loss stemmed largely from a write-down of $1.9 billion, which the company said was "related to the depreciation of goodwill and fixed assets, and the corresponding impact on deferred tax," which CFO Paul Tufano said was linked to the lower value of ALU's wireless and optical assets.

Like Nortel, Lucent had a number of problems this past decade and also had to deal with numerous acquisitions made at inflated telecom and dotcom bubble valuations. Moreover, Asian competitors have been ferocious and are taking the company on in ways it frankly can't compete with.

Last week at ITEXPO in Miami I had a chance to speak with Payam Maveddat of Taqua about telecom competition from Asia - this is before the Alcatel-Lucent news even broke. I reached out to him to get his precise words:

As I travel internationally to promote our US-based technology overseas, it has become evident to me that the holistic approach of the Chinese government of combining infrastructure financing and development, including roads, railroads, refineries, power generation, farming, and telecom does not allow for other companies to be able to compete on the same playing field in these developing markets and I am not surprised that Alcatel-Lucent is struggling to survive in this environment.

Of course there is more to it - Alcatel-Lucent is losing business in its own backyard as it hasn't innovated fast enough, some say it didn't cut deeply enough and its R&D investments are smaller than those of Huawei, a company with a smaller product line and access to cheaper labor.

Moreover, the company has (or had anyway) a strong enterprise PBX line of products but they are hardly heard about anymore - at least in the US. Of course the spin-off of Genesys makes little sense if you truly value your enterprise business. But the company has decided the carrier space will get the majority of its attention based on its outbound comunications with media and analysts.

Another area for expansion is the cloud where the company could have come up with many more services for resale by carriers, VARs and MSPs.

Having said that - the company's expansive line of business is bewildering and Oracle's acquisition of Acme Packet could signal yet another ferocius competitor - Oracle knows how to integrate and grow acquired businesses and if they pick up GENBAND things get a lot more interesting in the market as they can compete across a much broader product line.

TMC's Peter Bernstein had this to say about this news:

I’m on record as saying that the next 12-18 months will be a tipping point in the ICT industries, and what happens in this time period will dictate industry structure for years to come. This includes the telecom equipment sector, service provider as well as enterprise, where the accommodation of change and moving quickly are not historic attributes. In that respect, Verwaayen may turn out to be prescient about his successor needing to be focused like a laser on execution.

And he is right. So much can happen over the course of the next few years which will determine the future for years to come in the telecom and datacom markets.

Finally, we can't expect European and American leaders to get their act together in a manner which allows them to compete with China Inc. in developing markets. This means players like Alcatel-Lucent will have to have better products at better prices to become more competitive than Huawei, ZTE and a host of ther new entrants. Sadly this isn't likely but the positive news is the company is still a leader in advanced technologies like optical and wireless as evidenced by its announcement of a 400G/s optical connection spanning 275 miles in France.

See Payam Maveddat of Taqua's keynote from ITEXPO Miami last week - "Federation as a Service"

See GENBAND President and CEO Charlie Vogt be interviewed by me at ITEXPO Miami last week

ITEXPO Miami 2013 and Startup Camp7, Waiting for Sculley

2013-01-31T22:16:15Z

It's the second day of ITEXPO - I am at StartUp Camp7 listening to startups pitch the audience and panel on why their applications are the best. The founder of ProtegGO is speaking right now - he seems to have the audience interested. The idea behind the app is tthat a few minutes can save lives in an emergency. the app alerts 15 people in the event of an emergency.

Here are some pictures of the room and the Show Daily from today which has news about Battle for the Cloud, Telefonica, NSN, SBCs, Genesys, Trufone and more. John Sculley takes the stage very soon - I can't wait. He is one of the most interesting people I can imagine meeting in the tech space and we are very fortunate he chose to speak here.

Truphone Breaks Blackberry 10 News at ITEXPO

2013-01-30T19:42:31Z

Adam Linford of Trufone breaks exclusive news to Rich Tehrani (me :-) ) at ITEXPO that his company has a new VoIP app which works with the new Blackberry 10 OS which was launched today and is being shown here at ITEXPO Miami 2013. It also works with the company's global mobile SIM which allows many phones to utilize reduced calling rates around the world. Check out the video below for more.

TMC Looking for White Paper Writers

2013-01-23T21:44:42Z

TMC has seen an increasingly large amount of companies requesting its assistance in writing white papers. So much so that it made sense to reach outside our normal channels to my readers for guidance and suggestions.

At the moment our needs require writers who can produce those of the 3-5 page variety. Please use the contact form on my blog and I will either respond or forward your thoughts/comments to my team which handles this product for our company.

It's an App Eat App World

2013-01-17T20:36:31Z

Peter Bernstein has a great analysis piece on how the Unilever/Slim-Fast empire is struggling in-part because the company was too slow to come out with an app as well as the fact that other competitors have expanded their offerings to match the company or even take the lead. Personal experience has shown that the majority of my friends and acquaintances are now using apps to track their fitness – running and/or eating via calorie counting.

It’s amazing to me that even a company which profits handsomely from items sold in grocery stores can lose share because it didn’t provide apps on smartphones. This is in contrast to Starbucks who I tweeted about earlier this week – they really think mobile and social are crucial to their future.

Peter makes some good points in the piece and in a water-cooler conversation he said that the health app explosion may just be a fad. He goes on to say the problem with having so many apps is not having enough time to use them all.

This being a media company after all, I decided to take the conversation public and answer him on my blog. Hey, I don’t get paid to talk all day in a kitchen.

The bottom line is fitness apps are yet another tool in war on being and staying healthy. Consider them a productivity booster for the motivated. I just had lunch with a high school friend today who told me he just downloaded and uses a fitness app and moreover that he is an impatient person when it comes to weight loss.

I too am impatient. The problem with being impatient is if you don’t see results quickly you are more likely to give up. So fitness apps help keep you focused, motivated and maximize your results by letting you know how many calories you should burn and ingest in order to achieve your goals on a desired schedule.

BTW I don’t use a calorie counting app but I have found an app called WalkJogRun (iOS) to be a great way to track my running speed.

On Peter’s second point, I discovered through TMCnet an app called EasilyDo which looks at my schedule and alerts me to when I have to leave my office to get to my appointments on time. It uses GPS and worked great for about a week and then stopped alerting me about my meetings for some reason. then I turned off location services which temporarily stopped it from working correctly.

Putting that aside it also monitors Facebook for me and alerts me to birthdays and other events where I could congratulate my friends. It even fills out a field for me with “Happy Birthday Peter” allowing me to edit as needed. All I have to do is press send on each event and the post is taken care of for me.

The point is there are apps which make our lives easier – and even apps which work with other apps/cloud services to make our lives even more productive. We are increasingly becoming a mobile computing-dominated society and like it or not technology is here to stay and will soon become wearable meaning your gadgets and you will be even more tightly connected to you.

As this happens we can expect apps which manage apps and services to become more important than the underlying apps they are managing. Its truly an app eat app world.

Chinese Government Funds Global Telecom Roll Outs Through ZTE

2012-12-20T17:32:34Z

With global uncertainty the norm, many carriers have struggled to get financing for new infrastructure projects and in fact they have been a bit hesitant to spend on areas other than wireless where ROI is much more predictable. Subsequently, the financial challenges facing Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia Siemens Networks, ZTE and others aren’t expected to dissipate any time soon. What may be a surprise to some though is how ZTE, a Chinese telecom equipment manufacturer with relatively low costs could have lost $414 in Q3 of this year while seeing sales drop by 13% and gross margins cut in half.

In response to this decline, China Development Bank (CDB) an entity controlled by the Chinese government has given the company a $20B line of credit at very low rates allowing it to streamline operations, continue its expansion and perhaps most importantly finance its customers’ purchases.

According to Chris Antlitz, Networking & Mobility Practice Analyst at Technology Business Research (TBR), ZTE is investing heavily in smartphones, tablets, enterprise network communications technologies, LTE-Advanced, heterogeneous networks, software and services automation and will now be able to fund resource builds, such as new Global Network Operations Centers (GNOC) to support continued growth in the managed services business.

The company hopes this continued strategy of investments in technology and financing its customers will allow it to leapfrog Alcatel-Lucent and NSN to become the number three provider of telecom equipment by 2015. TBR agrees and you can see below (click to enlarge) their projected ranking of each of the major telecom vendors. They assume ZTE will grow 10% each year. They also believe Huawei and Ericsson will continue to grow but at progressively slower rates. Other vendors will see a decrease in sales according to their estimates.

The bottom line is ZTE could be the number three telecom equipment vendor in a few years thanks to the deep pockets of the Chinese government.

The challenge the non-Chinese manufacturers have is bloated infrastructure, unions and legacy costs such as pensions associated with being in business for decades. Alcatel-Lucent for its part recently secured $2.1B in financing but much of this money will go to pay debts and to buy time as the company looks to spin off assets. It’s worth noting the Paris-based company has patent assets which includes those developed by Bell Labs and the aggregate number of these valuable pieces of intellectual property is at 27,900 and counting.

Perhaps they will sell some soon? After all Kodak just landed $500M using a similar strategy.

It will be very interesting to see if politicians tackle this issue as it does seem ZTE just received a major advantage in the market and could threaten global jobs as a result. The flipside of course is with American politicians actually using the funding of GM and Chrysler as a political advantage – explaining that without the government’s help, both companies would have gone under – there really isn’t a moral high-ground in a negotiation. Then there was that whole broadband stimulus bill.

Time will tell and 2013 should be a very interesting year for the whole market as mobility usage continues to skyrocket but not all players will benefit equally from this growth.

Tomorrow's Cloud, Optimized by Plantronics

2012-12-19T22:52:49Z

Most people think of the cloud as being removed from the local environment because, after all, it requires the addition of a browser to access. But thanks to innovation from the people at Plantronics, the cloud can now reach through the browser and be closer to the user than ever before. In fact, the company has an SDK, which for the first time bridges the worlds of mobile and enterprise communications as well as computing. While CTI or computer-telephony integration is not a new concept, Plantronics uses its Spokes software as communications middleware to seamlessly connect mobile telephony with cloud-based or on-premise enterprise software.

Moreover, the headset can now provide contextual information to applications such as the mobile call state, mobile Caller ID, proximity, presence and wearing state. One of the more compelling new apps that uses this interface is Popcorn from ThreeWill; it integrates with a PC/laptop, Chatter, Salesforce.com and mobile devices while monitoring incoming phone calls. When one comes in, it pops a screen based on caller information in corporate databases. The problem being solved is mobile workers have work calls coming to their cell phones which don’t necessarily provide complete details regarding the caller.

How this differs from a traditional screen pop, in this case, is the call is coming over the mobile network so the enterprise PBX is out of the loop. Instead, the caller ID information is transmitted over Bluetooth to the Spokes software by Plantronics, which gives other applications access and these apps can in-turn query corporate databases in the cloud and in the data center.

Moreover, Popcorn allows the user to quickly type in notes, which are automatically placed in the appropriate customer record saving time and effort.

Another company using the Plantronics APIs is Datahug, they have solution that looks at a person you are in contact with at a company and ascertains via social networks and emails which other people in the company has contacts in your organization. Until now, Datahug could not sift through telephony data but it now can, thanks to the middleware-nature of the new Spokes APIs.

Continue reading on the Cloud Computing Magazine website. Free registration may be required for new readers.

How Apple Can Slow Samsung Down

2012-12-18T22:13:41Z

Tom Keating at TMC reported today that Samsung is beating virtually everyone at virtually everything. He discusses how they have become the dominant TV maker but this isn’t such big news at this point. What is interesting is the company replaced Nokia as the number one producer of cellphones – not a huge surprise at this point but a huge milestone as Nokia held the coveted top spot for 13 years.

Why is Apple, a company with more consumer loyalty than just about any other company being threatened by Samsung? In a word, variety.

Apple got demolished in the PC wars of the eighties because the competition was brutal and Apple couldn’t keep up with the price/performance of all the computers flooding the market from Compaq, Gateway, HP and Dell.

Apple was one company competing against many and couldn’t be a Jack of All Trades. As it tried, it mastered few.

Today, in the smartphone world the issue isn’t so much price/performance – although this is an important area – it has to do with choice. Often screen size.

Many want a wider phone than Apple provides. Other consumers want a phablet. some want low-priced smartphones which have larger screens than the iPhone 4 or 5 provide.

Apple’s business model is more of building perfection – they make the best products they can without compromising excessively. And they charge premium prices for everything. I recently paid $39 for a Lightning to 30-pin adapter. Shortly thereafter I purchased a Roku HD for $49.99 or $11 more – if this pricing doesn’t scream highway robbery (sorry: “exclusive”), I am not sure what does.

Samsung on the other hand as well as Motorola/Google and HTC all compromise for the sake of giving consumers increased choice.

Of course Apple understands the concept of choice but they aren’t going nearly as broad as the competition and it’s hurting them.

Consider Toyota, a very successful auto brand also owns Lexus on the high-end and Scion on the low end. Being successful today requires giving increasing choice.

If you still don’t agree, you should have tagged along when my wife asked me to pick up Jell-O at the grocery store. The company makes 14 kinds of ready-made gelatin from strawberry to black cherry sugar free and 29 varieties of the brand you make yourself from apricot to watermelon. And pudding? There are an additional 66 types!

Point being – I have been salivating over non-Apple smartphones since the introduction of the wider-than-Apple Droid-X phone which I discussed in July of 2010. The title of the post was exactly, Is Apple Repeating its Mistake from the Eighties? Where I said:

This could mean over time that the Android ecosystem gets to be so big that the economy of scale will lead to a variety of devices which have a plethora of form factors which appeal to a large variety of users. As this happens, it is unclear if customers will stay married to Apple or switch to the ecosystem with the newer and cooler devices which seem to emerge every month or even every few weeks.

Could I be more clear? Could the situation be any more obvious? Cupertino does seem to be awakening to reality as the iPad Mini was a response to seeing consumers buy a large quantity of a product Apple didn’t think consumers wanted – the Amazon Kindle Fire.

I haven’t given up on my suggestion that Apple consider a wider-screen phone – a recent post from last month said the company needs an iLane Bryant Phone, my playful way of getting them to understand, sometimes it’s good to have a little junk in the trunk.

Although the company has seen its stock price get punished recently from over $700 to under $510, I am not concerned about Apple’s future as there is tremendous momentum going in Cupertino’s direction. What should keep Tim Cook and company up at night though is every non-Apple device which is sold whether it runs a RIM, Microsoft or Google OS. The war for the future hearts and minds of users, consumers and businesses is all about the ecosystem which includes apps, music, video, accessories, cases and more recently chargers.

And yes, margins may suffer on some lower-volume or entry-level products but ask Toyota how many drivers move up from Scion to Camry to Lexus.

Apple simply cannot afford to be absent from any sectors of the market which consumers want. To make matters worse, when they fail, the media skewers them as evidenced by the recent Apple Maps fiasco. In-short, it is impossible to be ahead of the entire industry as it grows in every conceivable direction – laptops, tablets, desktops, phones, phablets and not ever fail. It has never been done and likely won’t.

But the challenge for now isn’t so great. For Heaven’s sake, just come out with a wider phone to give people who gravitate towards the HTC DNA, Galaxy SIII and Note 2 a viable choice.