Whenever I go to a conference, I learn a tremendous amount from the people I meet at the show. I really enjoy the impromptu networking which takes place at events as it allows me to learn so much about what is happening in the market. Ironically, I generally learn things I didn't think I would learn ahead of time. Quite often, I wish I would have known more about peoples' experiences before I met with them as it would allow me to be better prepared to ask pertinent questions.

I further wish I knew who was coming to events and and moreover I wish I could get a "brain dump" from them before the event so I could have a frame of reference before our conversations take place.

Imagine how much better networking at a show would be if I had an idea what people were generally thinking about the market before I even say hello.

In less than two weeks the world with gather at ITEXPO -- The World's Communications Conference to help select products for purchase, learn about the latest events in the telecom market and network with peers.

It is this last area where this blog entry should be of maximal benefit. You see, over the past month or so I have been interviewing the telecom movers and shakers who will be coming to ITEXPO. I certainly didn't interview every mover and shaker (exactly what is a telecom shaker anyway  ;)  ) but this list should give you a good idea who some of the speakers and exhibitors will be at this year's show.

The questions each person answered below may be slightly varied but what is common is the person's thoughts on their markets and where they think things may be going. I truly hope you find these interviews useful and I hope to see you at the show September 16-18, 2008 at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

   

NAME	COMPANY
Don Palmer	Sip Print
Jim Beuoy	OKS
Mark Stacy	Touchstone
John Nam	Phonevite
Jim Beuoy	OKS
Barry Sher	IVR Technologies
Ari Raban	Phone.com
John Doyle	CommuniGate Systems
David Mandelstam	Sangoma
Sharone Ben Levi	AudioCodes
Rupesh Chokshi	AT&T
Jeff Gallino	Callminer
Dr. David K. Schrader	Teradata
Mark Ricca	Intellicom Analytics
Xuedong Huang (XD)	Microsoft
Rick Dell	Mitel
Mark Lepko	Altitude Software North America
Liz Amaral	Enkata
Francis Carden	OpenSpan
Kevin Murphy	NEI
Chris Gravett	Aculab
Brian Schwarz	RedSky Technologies, Inc.
John Konczal	Sterling Commerce
Stefan Winkler	Symmetricom
Eric Thomas	FreedomVoice
Albert Chu	ACCESS Systems
Bill Miller	Digium (corrected -- sorry)
Randy Busch	Jazinga
Jeff Hicks	NetQos
Scott Charter	WBS Connect
Jim Slaby	Acme Packet
Dean Jordan	Telesphere
Justin McLain	Endeavor Telecom
Asif Rehman	Mitel
Steve Safley	VoIPConsultants
Frank Paterno	Intelliverse
Warren Sonnen	Epygi Technologies
Jim Jenkins	IQ Services
Jonathan Christensen	Skype
Mark De Clerq	Sitel Semiconductor
Ken Kuenzel	Covergence
Chris Lyman	Fonality
Michael Hermann	Cincinnati bell
Brough Turner	NMS
Shelley Veazie	CTI Group
Abdul Kasim	Critical Links
Eran Gal	Xorcom
Robert Messer	ABP
Todd Woodstra	SpinVox
Mike Coward	Continuous Computing
Laura Serna	Dialexia
James Rafferty	Dialogic
Ken Lowe	Sigma Designs
Rob McDougall	Upstream Works Software
Mary Boyd	Intrado
Henry Danser	Aspect Software
Gregory Giagnocavo	Vitelity
Vikram Saksena	Sonus Networks
Alastair Westgarth	Tango Networks
Greg Rothman	Cbeyond
Vivek Khuller	Divitas

I missed John Chambers on CNBC this morning. I wanted to hear what he had to say but unfortunately I was being interviewed about ITEXPO at the exact same time Chambers was on TV. Thankfully, Michael Dinan, a TMCnet editor was on hand to listen to Chambers and write up what he had to say.

Chambers seems relatively bullish on technology and anticipates growth between 12-17% for the long-term. In addition, the world's largest networking company announced a net of over 10 billion dollars for the fourth quarter. This is the first time the company has exceeded the $10 billion bogey.

Chambers also spent a good deal of time focusing on visual networking and the growth of this market. Since 1997 the company has predicted a CAGR of 46 percent growth rate in visual networking based upon their Visual Networking Index or VNI.

As many of us know Cisco cites the tremendous growth in wikis, blogs, social networking and video sites like YouTube as reasons for the explosion in the VNI.

For more check out this TMCnet article.

One of the most fascinating advances in political systems worldwide is the advent of technology like blogs and other web 2.0 initiatives such as social networking and video. But even the old technologies like SMS are coming into play as candidates look for any and every advantage to distance themselves from one another.

As you can imagine, with so much technology swirling around, making candidates more productive and efficient, we at TMC became mezmerized by it all. It got so interesting to us in fact we decided to categorize all of the stories we ran having to do with election technology. Afer a while we realized we had developed an entire website focusing exclusively on election technology and how it transforms poltics. I hope you enjoy it.

election-2008.tmcnet.com

It is worth mentioning that call centers are a vital part of of the election process and now that the government has more or less outlawed telemarketing for everyone but themselves, call centers continue to be a vibrant part of the election process. We will of course continue to chart the progress of this segment of the market as well -- as you may recall, TMC has been covering the call center space since 1982 -- before the term call center was even coined. :)

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.

Microsoft has this new computing initiative (Tom Keating's take with sound) which focuses on surface technology with hand-based gestures. Announced a few months back it is now in production and available at select Sheraton hotels (Boston, Chicago, New York, San Francisco and Seattle).

Microsoft says there are vertical applications for this technology such as retail, healthcare, automotive and I am sure they are right. My question is will people use these things in a hotel?

Somehow I doubt they will because I have seen so many technologies in the US which are in public locations not make it. Remember internet kiosks? Public fax machines? phone booths? It seems that if you want to get someone to use a technology in public it needs to provide power or connect to their iPhones/iPods.

Since I am sure we won't be seeing either of these things integrated into surface computing machines from Redmond, it will certainly be interesting to see how this plays out and whether I am wrong on this matter. Hope so.

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

Everyone likes a good fight and even though there really isn't a fight going on here it is worth noting Apple's market capitalization is now ahead of Google's (reminder I own shares in Google).

According to this story, by the close of trading on Wednesday, Apple's market value had edged up to $158.8bn - a shade ahead of Google's $157.2bn.

My take is that while Apple is obviously on fire, Google has a monopoly in search advertising and at the moment the world is in love with the model. Over the past years, Google has hired thousands of engineers to develop innovative products and services. Google's advertising model will be embedded into virtually all of these new services.

Gmail is an example of Google's ad model expanding onto a new service. This massive investment in people is for the long-term. In the short term, these people are a drag on earnings. Over the years, we will see the ad network supporting more and more services (or vice-versa). As this happens, the profit margins at Google will increase and Google should overtake Apple. After all, hardware is great but the margins on hardware are generally not great.

Apple can get away with charging more for their products because of the cache of the Apple name and because they know how to design products people like. One would imagine other hardware companies will eventually catch up and give Apple a run for their money.

Sadly, Microsoft has not impressed users with Vista so on the software front, Microsoft needs to come up with a better OS if they don't want to lose more share to Jobs and company.

On the PC front, Sony, Dell and even HP have begun to design computers which appeal to the Apple faithful. They seem to finally understand what is at stake.

On the cell phone front, RIM is worth watching closely as after Apple they have the most cache (at least in the US). I have tremendous respect for Nokia but they already have a device called the N800 which is better than the iPhone in many ways but no one seems to care for some reason.

I guess in the end, my feeling is hardware and devices are able to be duplicated given enough time but unknown and unseen algorithms that index the world's information are tougher to copy. In addition, Google's profits grow exponentially as more advertising competition comes online. After all, advertisers pay per click for ads and bid against others. Sure we are in an economic slowdown now but when things turn, the company should do better as advertisers will justify spending more on clicks that yield more buyers.

Over the years, TMC has tried many third party measurement sites and without a doubt, Google Analytics under reports traffic numbers as compared to other independent measurement services by an order of magnitude in many cases. Why is anyone's guess but this article confirms that Google's in-house numbers are lower than virtually all other measurement methods. This includes the well-respected Comscore.

In addition as John Battelle points out, there should be natural suspicion of measurement practices of any company which also runs an ad network. Here is an excerpt of his post which discusses Google Ad Planner in detail:

In short: If you were a media planner using Google Ad Planner, and you were looking for larger sites, you would be led to sites that are running Google AdSense, on average, over sites that do not. Net net: This data indicates that Google Ad Planner pushes ad dollars to Google sites over non-Google sites. This makes sense - Google has data on Google users, after all. So that data might naturally bias toward Google-related sites.

But as I said in my coverage: "Such a tool must be neutral and not bias advertisers toward buying on Google properties or those that have Google ads, which of course is going to be a perceived bias in any case. Such is the price of being Very Big."

So far, not so good on this measure. As Gian and Comscore have long pointed out to me, it takes more than raw data to make for good measurement. Ideally, you weight your data with a lot more knowledge of its context - what kind of machine is creating it (work or home? Man or woman? etc.). While Google once blended Comscore demographic data into its ad network, Comscore confirmed to me that this is no longer the case. And while it is subject to endless criticism, Comscore does have a lot more practice at this game than does Google. At least for now.

This data once again raises the question, long asked, of how Google is measuring in the first place. Most believe Google must be leaning heavily on its Toolbar data (see TC for more here and Danny here), and this data does nothing to counter that argument. The strong bias toward Google network sites is suspicious - one can imagine that folks who might install the Google toolbar are clearly already biased toward visiting Google-related sites, for example.

But Google will not acknowledge any use of the Toolbar. Instead it said in its announcement: "Google Ad Planner combines information from a variety of sources, such as aggregated Google search data, opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in external consumer panel data, and other third-party market research."

In short, it is difficult to trust any measurement numbers unless you know how the numbers are being measured. Until Google explains how it calculates traffic in more detail, there should be natural suspicion. This is especially the case as Google seems to be the only service reporting such low traffic numbers. Perhaps they do know something that everyone else is missing but if they do they should tell us what it is.