In less than two weeks something extraordinary will happen. Not only will the global communications industry convene in Los Angeles for ITEXPO but there will be over 100 members of the media, analysts, etc meeting with the world's leading vendors in the communications and technology space.

In addition, well over a dozen TMC editors will be on-hand at the show for the first ever TMC Editor's Week. Close to 100 meetings have been set up by my team so far and counting.

If you are interested in having a meeting at the show with a TMC editor be sure to email Todd Keefe ASAP.

Here are a few of the TMC editors present and depending on scheduling, you can meet with them:

• Greg Galitzine
• Rich Grigonis
• Bob Emmerson (European Editor)
• Peter Radizeski (Reseller Channel)
• David Yedwab (Unified Communications)
• Tom Keating (New Product Reviews)
• Brendan Read (CRM/Call Center)
• Erik Linask
• Michael Dinan
• Tim Gray

Fonality just received a $12 million financing round by Draper Fisher Jurvetson Growth Fund. This is a powerful statement by this top fund that they really beleive in the open source communications story and to be quite honest, it is tough to disagree that this is a great space to be in as most every vendor in the space is doing well.

I have covered Fonality before -- the company makes quality PBX products and I have had a chance to test the Trixbox PBX for a number of months and remain impressed.

Getting back to Draper -- the fund has had some great investments including Hotmail, Baidu, Focus Media (advertising in China), Skype, Overture, Divx and many others. Some of the lesser known, current investments include Jobfox in the recruitment space, Kajeet -- in mobile services and Visto in wireless email.

But getting back to Fonality, the company has employed an interesting twist in the communications space as their PBX has taken some of the best parts of open-source and fused this with a hosted model -- allowing for example the recording of phone calls on Fonality servers which do not reside in your office.



At this point it should be obvious the open source communications market remains one of the most exciting spaces in telecom.

If you are interested in the open source market be sure to come to ITEXPO in two weeks in Los Angeles where you will see all the open-source leaders such as Digium/Asterisk, Pika, Sangoma and of course Fonality. You can also take advantage of Fonality/Trixbox certifications which will be held at the show.

See Also: trixbox Pro 2.0 review

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.

The financial news networks seem to thrive on giving us the negative news regarding the economy. Jobs being lost; wages decreasing and all sorts of other negative bits and pieces.

Well there is something you won't hear about if you focus all your time and attention on the network news. It seems in fact that there is some great economic news in the world of IP communications. In fact, VoIP jobs are rising in salary at a time when so many other jobs are not.

OnForce Inc., is an online jobs mart where employers and workers meet on the Internet and agree on an hourly rate and a recent report from the company shows growth in VoIP rates have increased from 1.5 to 1.95 between Q1 and Q2. This basically means VoIP jobs are now paying twice the average of all IT jobs.

Get this... Jobs in the field of printers and point of sale systems (cash registers, etc) command 1/3 the salary of those in VoIP!

If you are in the VoIP space, your time is now. Sure these salary levels may not be this high forever but it is great to see demand and salaries increase so rapidly in a time where news in other markets is generally not as good.

If you are looking to get into the VoIP market or enhance your skills, the time is now. Don't wait... Don't delay.

There are many certifications you can look into and many are very good but only one is offered by TMC -- the company which publishes the only VoIP-related magazine -- Internet Telephony and puts on the world's only IP Communications event ITEXPO...

And of course that would be TMC University. Frankly, you cannot find a better certification anywhere IMHO and as you may have noticed it is tough to be humble when you think your product is so great.

Below is a list of VoIP-related courses and certifications which will be available to you September 16-18, 2008 in Los Angeles, CA. By the way, these courses come with a satisfaction guarantee and I have heard many times that resellers and others have found the certifications at past events valuable and responsible for increased business and rates.

I hope to see you at the show.

	Date	Course	Hosted by
Tuesday, September 16, 2008 Microsoft OCS Tuesday, September 16, 2008 FMC/Mobility   Tuesday, September 16, 2008 Open Source   Tuesday, September 16, 2008 SIP in the Contact Center   Wednesday, September 17, 2008 IP Network Security   Wednesday, September 17, 2008 SaaS Thursday, September 18, 2008 Unified Communications   Thursday, September 18, 2008 SIP: The Foundation for Building Enhanced Services Thursday, September 18, 2008 Next-Generation Call Center Management

I made a logical leap in my headline -- inferring you can get famous -- in this case, written up in Popular Science Magazine if you come to TMC's Los Angeles ITEXPO conference in just over two weeks. Let me explain.

About a year and a half ago, Ari Zoldan, CEO of Launch 3 Communications -- a company installing global WiMAX networks came to ITEXPO and won an Toyota FJ Cruiser at the show. Now he seems to be popping up everywhere.

I just read an article in Popular Science Magazine (a great pub BTW) where Zoldan in his new capacity as CEO of Quantum Networks, LLC explains to inventors the best way to go about getting VC money from a firm like his. A few points to consider are -- call the CEO directly and don't give up majority interest.

Here is the article (look to the right side of the page).

Oh, and in just over two weeks, ITEXPO will be in full force and this year we are giving away a Toyota Prius to one lucky winner. Will it be you? Perhaps. Come to the show and find out.

If you haven't been paying attention you just may have missed the fact that bloggers have been going crazy lately about VoIP blocking on planes and the associated ways of getting around said blocking. Long story short -- SIP was being blocked on American Airline flights but Flash widgets were not blocked.

Andy Abramson has an original post on the matter and PhoneBoy has thoughts on why airplane broadband providers can likely block anything thrown at them.

Like I said a while back -- isn't it amazing how much effort airlines throw at stopping passengers from talking on phones when they don't get paid by the minute? I remember how they used to push us to use the in-flight phones in years past. Now it is easier to hack into the Pentagon's IT systems than talk on a flight.

I have often discussed how well the open-source communications market is doing and certainly the success of Asterisk/Digium is a good indication of how the market is today and where it might be headed. A while back I visited Digium's Huntsville, Alabama headquarters just before they were moving to their new building. I even had a chance to take pictures of the building as it was in the process of going up.

Well, fast forward over a year and the building is up, running and just received a visit from TMC. Tom Keating was on hand to take dozens of photos and reminisce about the history of open source telecom and where things are heading.

You don't want to miss his post.

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.