Communications and Technology Blog - Tehrani.com - SIP Archives

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.

Interactive Intelligence Explores Small Call Center Roots

2013-03-18T13:00:00Z

Interactive Intelligence is an example of a disruptor which went mainstream and in the process changed the way contact centers operated. Soon after launching in the mid-nineties the company would attract huge crowds to its booths at trade shows as it showed off all-in-one solutions which combined the dialer, ACD, PBX and more into a complete solution which operated seamlessly together. The company was first to espouse the concept and is responsible for getting the competition to emulate them.

In a recent meeting with Joe Staples, CMO and Senior VP of Marketing he told me the company has successfully acted upon its growth strategy from 2006 which was designed to increase its sales to large companies such as Rolex, BMW, Crutchfield, Sony Honda and many others. Their average deal-size in 2005 was in fact $87k and it is now $306 with its number of deals over $1m increasing from just one to 49 on a comparative basis over these seven years.

Interactive Intelligence hasn’t lost track of the companies that helped it get started as evidenced by the launch today of its new CaaS Small Center solution, which gives small contact centers with up to 50 contact center agents many of the same features the vendor has offered for years to the most sophisticated contact centers in the world. Pricing for CaaS Small Center starts at a flat fee of $99 per agent, per month. Included in the offer is the ability to add the company’s cloud-based PBX features for up to 100 non-contact center users.

Joe was sure to point out how mature the company’s offering features recording, UC, real-time speech analytics, quality management, multichannel communications including voice, web chat and social media, routing and real-time speech analytics with keyword spotting. There is also integration with Salesforce and other services out of the box. Finally there are guaranteed service levels, geo-redundancy from 11 global data centers, security, compliance including JITC, and customer isolation through virtualization.

He further explained the company focused on keeping the offering easy to use with limited set-up options and deployment within 15 days instead of months. Other areas of note are the ability to sign a one-year contract to lock in your price – a dedicated implementation manager, Quick Spin which allows you to try before you buy and of course a month-to-month commitment if you prefer this option

Interestingly Interactive Intelligence has gone from a disruptive new entrant in the market to an established player. By offering much of the power of its full contact center solutions in a simple, cost-effective, no-commitment way, it has to some degree slowed the disruption it could see from a new breed of cloud-based solutions providers. Moreover, the benefit Interactive brings to the table is stability as well as scalability – companies want a system that grows with them.

Staples says 65% of contact centers in the world have less than 50 agents but they are often underserved because they buy from a startup or just go with an add-on solution provided by a PBX vendor. In fact, one of the company’s newest customers for this new offering switched from another solution which didn’t allow them to see how many calls were waiting in the queue.

The purpose of CaaS Small Center is to allow these call centers who have the same needs as their larger brethren to access the same features and functions they have on a pay-as-you-go or should I say pay-as-you-grow-basis.

Metaswitch Asks: Are You Ready to be a Software Telco?

2013-03-02T12:26:58Z

Virtualization has made the IT world much more efficient and cloud technology allows applications to scale up and down at will in a far more cost-effective manner while requiring little to no CAPEX. There is hardly an industry which hasn't been affected as software and hardware vendors have worked together to make sure they are ready for this new world where a single server can run multiple instances of an application on servers which are flung far around the globe. Even the PBX-world has gotten into the game with many vendors - especially those doing business with Fortune-class companies supporting virtualized software communications servers.

In a recent conversation with Steve Gleave (pictured) and Carol Daniels of Metaswith at Mobile World Congress 2013, I learned the company is taking the move to virtualization seriously and their recent product launch of 19 months ago - the SBC, was developed to run in a such an environment.

The benefits of this evolution are obvious - carriers will be able to utilize the same virtualized technology they use in their data centers in their networks and purchase in a far more flexible way. Moreover, their services will run on bare-metal servers and will scale far more rapidly. This means they can take advantage of public clouds, virtual private clouds, private clouds and hybrid clouds - all the amazing choices a typical enterprise has today. Security, cost and CAPEX versus OPEX decisions will likely drive their decisions - again, just like an enterprise or data center decision-maker.

One other crucial benefit of this move is there will be more choice for carriers looking to deploy solutions from the more innovative companies in the market. Typically these are the players who do the most interesting things but they quite often run out of money before carriers deploy their solutions and subsequently they go under. For me its been about 30 years spent meeting the principals of these doomed entities - early in my career at trade shows such as TCA, SuperComm, ICA, Computer Telephony and NATA which took place in the eighties and nineties.

The large-scale euthanizing of innovative telco suppliers (and many of the events they attended as a side-effect) has created a cycle of uncertainty where carriers want to be sure their solution partners are going to be around for the long-haul. Moreover they want them to be there to scale rapidly and service what they sell. In the world of hardware this means a new vendor has to have very deep pockets to be able to sell to large carriers.

What has become common in the market is for CSPs to wait for the larger players to emulate what the smaller guys are doing and just buy from the company they arre used to doing business with. Or in other cases, the smaller players would be "coerced" into agreements with large equipment providers who would take part of the revenue from the sale and provide the gravitas, relationships and support needed to keep the large carrier happy. This is how Acme Packet got its start for example and in doing so, took out the competition in the SBC space last decade.

The point is, now hardware players will become software companies which means the bar for purchase from a large telco while still high, has dropped down quite a bit. This was the goal by the way of the ATCA modular communications initiative last decade from Intel where hardware vendors could all write software on a single hardware standard but the Intel division certainly wasn't pulling its own weight as evidenced by the fact it was sold off to Radisys in 2007 for $25M.

This time though the chicken-and-egg problem may finally have eroded allowing current carriers to be far more flexible in the new services they offer and upstart carriers can rapidly scale and compete with incumbents without having to purchase massive amounts of central office equipment to get started.

Gleave further discussed the industry's proactive push towards Network Standards Virtualization through the ETSI working group by the same name. The backers of this initiative are the largest global carriers such as AT&T, BT, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telecom Italia, Telefonica and Verizon and 52 other vendors joined together to support this initiative this past January. Obviously there seems to be a huge push to shake up the way comms systems are designed.

You may remember, Metaswitch once owned a separate company called Data Connection which was very strong in developing and selling low-level protocol software stacks and related solutions. The two companies merged some years back into the parent company. Gleave emphasized, "We have software experience." He continued with a bit more confidence, "Writing for multicore and hypervisor environments are skills we believe we have as well." He added in a manner which seemed to be subtly taunting the competition, "All the core functions [of our solutions] such as IMS have been rewritten from the ground up to run in the cloud."

Expect the Metaswitch you know as the application server, gateway and SBC company to still do all these things but in software, running in virtualized environments on bare-metal servers. Their goal is to sell these solutions to you in order to turn your hardware telco into a software telco.

As a result of the meeting I asked Steve Gleave to speak on being a software telco at ITEXPO in Las Vegas, August 27-29 in Las Vegas. He is a great speaker and worth the trip to come see. I would mark your calendar now.

IPgallery Helps Carriers Become Social Hub and More

2013-03-01T19:57:11Z

Communications service providers once the center of the customer's world have awoken to the new reality - social and apps are the new hub. In fact, Facebook, Twitter and a wave of other social networks have fully overtaken the telephone number as the primary method of communicating among many - especially younger users. Then there are the the OTT VoIP and video vendors such as Skype. The telephone number has gone from being a protected client relationship to an afterthought. Even the bright spot related to phone numbers - massive texting revenue has recently been eroded by OTT apps like WhatsApp and even iOS messaging which seamlessly takes text messages off the operator network.

Enter IPgallery, a company playing in the IP communications carrier space for over a decade who wants to help service providers become the focal point of this brave new world of social and apps. Their suggestion is to provide customers with a social communications and hosted-PBX solution which integrates so seamlessly with popular web-based servies that users will rarely need to leave the comfort of the environment. An HTML5 interface allows a cloud-based service to tap into APIs of a slew of other companies to provide social, mapping and just about anything else a user can think of.

Just like a person might use HootSuite as a central hub to interface with numerous social networks, IPgallery helps carriers provide customized user interfaces which they believe are captivating enough to keep consumers living inside them.

Consumers for their part have shown a willingness to spend huge amounts off time interfacing with specific services such as Facebook. In fact, companies are tripping over themselves to have users interact with them on the world's most-popular social network. Carriers have a shot to get control back by providing customers with a user interface worth "living in."

In addition, they can add services such as shopping and entertainment and even combine location information to provide compelling applications which rival those of the OTT world. As carrier information is even richer than what is available to typical smart phone applications, they can actually provide better services than consumers can get elsewhere.

At Mobile World Congress in 2013 the Israeli company showed me an app they wrote which accesses Facebook and Maps and provides the photos of friends on their actual locations on a map. A user can select one or more friends and start a group communication, complete with file sharing and collaboration.

There is a great deal more - such as integrated e-learning, a hosted PBX with separate skins and functionality broken out by department such as accounting or sales. Finally, operators can add functionality by providing cloud-storage which could be used to hold content which is shared between users on the system.

IPgallery functions as part software/integration vendor and part systems-integrator, working with carriers the world-over to develop solutions which they need in their particular markets. This allows carriers to focus on their core competency while taking advantage of best-practices being developed by other service providers.

We often hear of discussion revolving around whether carriers are ok just being "dumb pipe" providers and regardless of the answer, there is definite value in owning the home page of the customer's world. Amazon has used this prime real estate to successfully push Kindle devices and Google uses it to push its Chrome OS, tablets and other devices.

Perhaps the better question is - what are the benefits from being the gateway to your customer's online activities including social, commerce and shopping? The answer of course is increased revenue and flexibility. And as service providers grapple with stagnant to lower ARPU and increasing network costs as they upgrade to 4G and beyond, exploring new revenue opportunities which could also reduce churn seems to make a lot of sense.

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.

Shockingly Nortel's Frank Dunn not Found Guilty in Canada

2013-01-15T11:52:31Z

In February 2004 I was invited to a Nortel analyst day. The Canadian telecom giant had great news to share about their worldwide sales – especially in China. CEO Frank Dunn was the primary speaker at the conference and explained just how well the company was doing. Thereafter, I met with division head after division head and the story kept getting better. The stated sales increases seemed too good to be true and it turns out they were – helping to batter the company’s share price over a number of years once news was released that the books were cooked.

Nortel’s senior management had large financial incentives to turn the company around quickly and they fraudulently recognized revenue at times which violated GAAP accounting standards in order to pay less bonuses than needed and to ensure they had reserve earnings needed to make the numbers in future quarters which allowed them to receive performance-oriented bonuses.

On March 12, 2007 the US DOJ said as much in a complaint against former execs Frank A. Dunn, Douglas C. Beatty, Michael J. Gollogly and MaryAnne E. Pahapill. "The fraudulent conduct at issue here was egregious and long-running. Each of the defendants betrayed Nortel's investors and their misconduct gave rise to billions of dollars in shareholder losses," said Linda Thomsen, Director of the Commission's Division of Enforcement. "The action we take today sends a strong message that officers of U.S.-filing foreign corporations will be held to the same standards of accountability that are required of all participants in the U.S. financial markets."

Asa result of this incident, the loss of trust between Nortel execs and the public markets, customers, media and analyst community coupled with the company overpaying for acquisitions during the dotcom and telecom bubbles combined with competition from ZTE and Huawei eventually forced this Canadian telecom icon to declare bankruptcy.

This is why I read with some surprise that an Ontario Superior Court judge dismissed the case against these same former Nortel Networks execs. The judge, Frank Marrocco said he was "not satisfied" the financials were misrepresented.

Greg Draper, who heads investigative and forensic services at chartered accountancy and business consulting firm MNP, says that the burden of proof was difficult to meet in this case.

"To prove that there was not just intention to do the conduct, moving the money and making the financial statements that were made, but to do it with a criminal purpose to defraud shareholders and the corporation is difficult to prove," he said.

In his judgment, Marrocco said the decision to only release $80 million in excess accruals when it had $189 million to boost numbers during the company's first quarter of 2003 were not out of the ordinary.

This policy did not lead to misrepresenting Nortel's "financial results to the investing public or Nortel's audit committee or Nortel's board of directors," he wrote.

Marrocco concluded the company's statements were restated twice in one quarter to reflect differences of opinion in accounting practices, not as an effort to cover up fraud.

Although the judge found that genuine accrued liabilities were not released when they should have been nor adjusted when they should have been, he was "not satisfied that any or all of the accused understood the extent of the excess accrued liabilities on Nortel's balance sheet." Furthermore, the amount was immaterial to the finances of such a large company, and even if they were not released, the executives would've received their profit bonuses anyway, Marrocco told the court.

At trial, Dunn's lawyer said his client approved the accounting at the telecom equipment maker but should not be held responsible if the figures given to him were inaccurate. At the time, Dunn was preoccupied with trying to save the company and trusted that the balance sheets were correct when he approved them, argued the defense.

"I am satisfied that non-cash impacting excess accrued liabilities on the balance sheet were not a priority," the judge wrote in his decision.

Dunn made the following statement as a result:

For a very long time, integrity has been the foundation of Nortel Networks' corporate governance and business practices. The documentary evidence and testimony re-affirmed this core value that I witnessed over my 28 years with the company," he said. "I am looking forward to turning the page on this chapter of my life.

At one point Nortel had almost 100,000 employees. While Dunn and the other managers are no doubt happy right now, many ex-Nortel staffers may feel like they have just been cheated out of seeing justice served to a management team which helped kill an industry icon.

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.

Who Should Buy Linksys and how does the Cloud fit in?

2012-12-17T22:32:28Z

Cisco recently appointed Barclays to help it auction off Linksys – a move consistent with the company’s desire to exit low-margin consumer businesses as it looks to invest in high-margin areas like software and services. But as the saying goes, one man’s garbage is another man’s gold. Linksys is indeed a treasure to the right partner like Google or even Samsung.

The reason is simple – both companies need to blunt the move by Apple into the home and entertainment is the future of technology as consumer technology trends coupled with BYOD turn into corporate success. When the iPhone first came out CEO after CEO explained to me patiently about how they could never abandon RIM and that the iPhone would never be secure enough for their IT departments to sanction.

Well, that was a short wait as a few years later RIM is gasping for air and even mighty Microsoft is trying to figure out how to get people to buy its mobile products.

As Apple invades the living room further with its rumored new TV solution – whatever it may be, the defensive strategy of its competition has to be to get into the home via an adjacent method and leverage this success with add-on solutions. Of course the acquisition of Scientific Atlanta by Cisco coupled with Linksys was in-theory going to do the same thing except the cable and telecom companies stood in-between Cisco and its customers meaning the leading networking company wasn’t going to come out with an OTT television solution.

The question is – who should buy Linksys and the answer to me seems to be anyone who needs to compete with Apple. Aside from Google and Samsung, let’s be sure we add Microsoft to the list as well. Imagine what they can do with Linksys and Skype integration – coupled of course with Lync and Xbox. This combo would certainly make the company even more powerful in the world of VoIP/IP communications.

Then there are the cloud vendors – there is a natural fit between products and services these days – Amazon has shown us that software can and will subsidize hardware. In its case, a suite of cloud services and apps are there to increase consumer spending on products in the Amazon ecosystem.

Google with its Chromebooks gives away lots of cloud services in the hopes customers will buy more. Expect this trend to extend across hardware in general meaning companies like Carbonite and Mozy may look at Linksys as a way to get consumers to use their services on a trial basis.

In a way, both of these companies can justify the purchase of Linksys by subsequently cutting their marketing budgets as the sale of each router and other consumer electronics product bundled with a free trial is effectively the same as the result of advertising on radio, TV or the web.

Finally, there is Dell and HP – I can’t imagine either company successfully pulling off such a merger but the synergies between consumer printing, computing and networking are too obvious to ignore. Moreover there are a slew of Asian vendors – many in China who could take the Linksys brand and use it to introduce a number of new products which would have immediate name recognition in the US. Lenovo leveraged IBM at first to do something similar – I imagine in my scenario a Chinese manufacturer renaming itself as opposed to the other way around. Of course the US government may have something to say about such a move from China but then again being a consumer play, Linksys may not get much attention from the feds looking to keep our communications networks safe.

Either way the biggest opportunity for growth for Linksys seems to be the melding of hardware with cloud services such as storage, audio and video. Apple and Amazon are pulling this off brilliantly and it seems to me the future of commodity hardware will be using it to push a surrounding ecosystem. In a way consumers can thank the cloud for adding more value to the products they buy and for its ability to subsidize hardware in order to make upfront costs more attractive.

Michael Robertson's New Dar.fm

2012-12-11T22:06:45Z

Michael Robertson is one of the most interesting people in the tech world having burst onto the scene during the dotcom days with the launch of MP3.com which allowed users to store their CD collection in the cloud. Now a commonplace concept, at the time the record labels weren’t sure what to do about the company so they defaulted to what they do well, suing the startup into oblivion. Of course it didn’t help that Napster was popular during the same time and brought major attention to how new technologies were robbing record labels and artists.

Talk about being a visionary.

He had a string of other startups as well such as SIPphone which was later purchased by Google and another music related company MP3Tunes which filed Chapter 7 bankruptcy.

I had a chance to meet him a few times as he was producing SIPphone – another vey novel business which showed how creative he could be.

More recently he has launched a novel service called Dar.fm which allows you to record radio for later listening. Recently he put the word out that his company will be very transparent with the release of the relevant statistics regarding the shows his company tracks.

He also released some analysis worth pondering. Half the top hosts are liberal/progressive as opposed to the “conventional wisdom” espoused by many. For example, Robert Kennedy said this week that the right-wing controls 95% of talk radio in our country.

But getting back to tech – Robertson has done it again. He has started a new business which makes you think, “Hey, why didn’t I think of that?” and then after a few more moments you say to yourself, “Probably because I don’t feel like dealing with lawyers for the next few years.”

WebRTC Expo 2012 Winding Down

2012-11-29T23:53:29Z

Sorry for the delayed post - accidentally posted as "draft."

Thanks to all of you who came to WebRTC Expo 2012 in South San Francisco – the show was amazingly successful thanks to many of you who took time from your “day jobs” to learn about what many are calling a once-in-a-lifetime transformational communications opportunity. I happened to take a shot and video of a SIP to WebRTC session just now which you can see below. Here are more event photos as well.

WebRTC is much more than a PSTN replacement as Ericsson mentioned on stage but it is still interesting to see the evolution from PSTN and digital PBXs to IP-PBXs to IP-PBXs using SIP to now WebRTC and whatever additional software or equipment this transformation may entail.

There seems to be good interest in this topic as it's the last breakout session of the third day of the conference and the room is quite full. WebRTC Conference & Expo will take place again in New York in May and in November back in Northern California. See you there.

WebRTC Conference & Expo Kicks Off

2012-11-28T16:48:33Z

I am at the WebRTC Conference & Expo here at the South San Francisco Conference Center and the mood at the show is positive. What I have heard over and over from telecom equipment vendors, call center vendors and software vendors is that WebRTC is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity in the telecom space.

At a cocktail party sponsored by Google and Plantronics many people told me that the handset players are in trouble while the headset vendors have a great opportunity. This of course explains why Plantronics has taken such an active role at this conference and in this space.

I will update you with more as the event progresses - here are some photos of the show for your viewing pleasure - The person at the podium is Phil Edholm who has partnered with TMC and Crossfire Media to host this conference.

Avaya and Mitel Cross at Canadian Border

2012-11-16T18:59:51Z

New Jersey-based Avaya, spun out of Lucent and previously AT&T has a decades-long history of providing business communications solutions. With its purchase of Nortel’s business communications assets a few years back it picked up even more knowledge, know-how and relationships. Mitel, the Kanata, Ontario-based global business communications company cofounded in 1973 by Sir Terry Matthews is known for delivering superior technology. More recently Mitel has become publicly traded and acts sort of as a partner to the dozens of Sir Terry Matthews’s companies under the Wesley Clover Brand.

Avaya and Mitel do compete to some degree but Mitel is known more for small to medium systems while Avaya is known as the big-leagues supplier. Cisco has been a major competitor taking share from Avaya this past decade while ShoreTel has done the same to Mitel.

Now these two iconic brands are crossing the border in opposite directions. Mitel has announced a deal with Tech Data to target the US SMB market. Avaya will be launching its GrowRight channel program which includes a deal registration bonus in Canada. The program pays solutions providers 20% back per quarter on new and strategic product sales including RADvision and IP Office products.

The potential here is obviously bigger for Mitel as the US is a much larger market than Canada. You may remember, some years back, Mitel purchased Inter-Tel in-part to grow its sales in the US SMB market. The problem is the very solid Inter-Tel brand was killed in the process and Mitel didn’t brand themselves much in the US, post-acquisition. The result? Over $723M down the drain.

But Mitel is a new company as they have great virtualization technology and new management. Will SMBs buy from Mitel because they have a virtualization edge? Probably not, because if they aren’t current customers, they may not be familiar enough with Mitel to pull the trigger. The only way the Tech Data deal works for the Canadian company is if they began to brand themselves properly in the US or the Tech Data channel is very strong in telecom and decides to actively push Mitel products. In my experience however, resellers aren’t huge fans of promoting products which get customers responding “You want me to buy from who?”

Avaya for its part may make some progress selling its recently acquired RADvision products in the Great White North. I don’t expect the sales to be huge as the market isn’t so big but Canada seems to be one of the few countries with a stable economy these days which makes it a great location for an organization in search of sales growth.

WebRTC: The Phone meets the Web

2012-10-19T17:40:22Z

We have seen the multi-billion dollar communications market get disrupted as the phone met the IP network. In the video below Phil Edholm describes how with WebRTC, the phone meets the web. As he describes, even though IP communications has been around for more than a decade, there hasn’t been a fundamental change in how we communicate. We still hang our phones off servers which allow communications to take place. Now, every web browser will become a multimedia communications engine, allowing browsers to communicate to other browsers directly. This is a totally new way of working – I like to refer to it as putting the power of an open-Skype into every browser.

Phil believes WebRTC will change communications the way the web changed the way information is shared. In other words – you can communicate very easily with others – without the need for continuous and central command and control.

As you may know, Edholm was Vice President of Technology Strategy and Innovation for Avaya GCS and previously the CTO/CSO for Nortel Enterprise Solutions. He knows the industry well and has been a past keynoter at ITEXPO. TMC has partnered with him and Crossfire Media to launch a new conference called WebRTC EXPO in order to educate the world on the power of this new technology.

Here is a partial list of people who should attend the event and why, according to Phil. The last one is my addition:

Enterprise IT: How will WebRTC integrate or even potentially replace your unified communications systems? Will you need to integrate WebRTC into your contact center to more fluidly communicate with current and potential customers?

Carriers: The implications of every browser allowing for rich communications to impact your business model can’t be overstated. In short, the pace of communications disruption continues. The simple question is, “Will you be driving or under the steamroller?”

Website owners: Does the addition of communications to the browser change your business model? How do you benefit from WebRTC? Can you use it to add value or generate more revenue for example?

Developers: This is a ground floor opportunity to change the world by writing new and innovative applications which weren’t possible before.

Investors: The entire phone network has just come under increasing pressure as a result of WebRTC. Moreover, Facebook, Twitter, Zynga and other companies with large reach have the ability to become their own phone network overnight.

WebRTC Expo takes place in South San Francisco, Nov 27-29, 2012 with keynotes from Plantronics and Thrupoint. We hope to see you there.

Major Flaws in Ballmer's Apple-Fighting Strategy?

2012-10-11T16:33:06Z

It really is shocking that Apple has pulled so far ahead of every other device maker with designs that are more art than technology focused. For those of you familiar with Bang & Olufsen products (BeoSound 8 pictured above) you know in some ways Apple’s designs are a copy of this iconic audio manufacturer meaning Apple didn’t entirely invent cool looking consumer electronics devices and others should be able to compete effectively in the space.

I am sure Microsoft agrees but as they’ve watched Apple become the cool and fast growing computer company they used to be, they determined they need to be more like Cupertino. This of course is the reason the company decided it was more important to design new hardware than keep their partners churning out directly competitive products happy.

With the Microsoft Surface Tablet introduction they told the entire ecosystem at once – you suck.

Steve Ballmer’s recent shareholder letter spells it out further. In it he says:

There will be times when we build specific devices for specific purposes, as we have chosen to do with Xbox and the recently announced Microsoft Surface. In all our work with partners and on our own devices, we will focus relentlessly on delivering delightful, seamless experiences across hardware, software and services. This means as we, with our partners, develop new Windows devices we'll build in services people want.

The key word above is “delightful.” Whether buyers consider this upcoming tablet to be accurately described by this term remains to be seen but the comment reinforces the “you suck” comment to partners as it suggests they can’t build such products.

Continuing, Ballmer says:

A great example of this shift is Windows 8. Windows 8 will come to market Oct. 26, 2012, with beautiful hardware that will light up with our consumer cloud services. Windows 8 unites the light, thin and fun aspects of a tablet with the power of a PC. It's beautiful, it's functional, and it's perfect for both personal and professional use. Xbox Music, Video, Games and SmartGlass apps make it possible to select a movie from a PC, start playing it on the TV, and finish watching it on a phone. SkyDrive, our cloud storage solution, effortlessly connects content across a user's devices. Bing's powerful search technologies in Windows 8 will help customers get more done. Skype has a beautiful new Windows 8 app and connects directly into the new Office.

The idea here is to use Skype and Bing as differentiators against Apple. The problem is how is Microsoft better able to integrate search and Skype than Apple? To keep its value, Skype has to run on Apple hardware and if its inferior on Apple’s platform, users may just switch to FaceTime which can easily be augmented to compete with “Skype Out” and other features.

Moreover, I have used SkyDrive and the product needs work. It seems to have been designed by sadistic engineers. Moreover the duplication between LiveMesh and SkyDrive was beyond confusing and multiple URLS made the experience really painful for me as I tested the service. If Microsoft is serious about the cloud they need to make life easier for users.

Here is another salient comment from the Microsoft head:

Fantastic devices and services for end users will drive our enterprise businesses forward given the increasing influence employees have in the technology they use at work — a trend commonly referred to as the Consumerization of IT. It's one more reason Microsoft is committed to delivering devices and services that people love and businesses need.

Yet another statement of the inferiority of the current hardware on the market.

If we are to assume that Surface is a hit and Microsoft starts to regain traction – two big ifs, the job will only be partly done by Redmond. You see the company needs to regenerate excitement around its brand. Xbox Kinect is a spectacular product but doesn’t create the excitement of Apple. Ballmer needs a cult-like following for Surface and they will likely have to create a Surface phone which needs a similar following. And from there the company is going to have to make sure they push the Ultrabook market which has no identity despite many of them – especially those from Asus being incredible machines.

Ballmer sums up the opportunities which lie ahead for Microsoft as follows:

Developing new form factors that have increasingly natural ways to use them including touch, gestures and speech.
Making technology more intuitive and able to act on our behalf instead of at our command with machine learning.
Building and running cloud services in ways that unleash incredible new experiences and opportunities for businesses and individuals.
Firmly establishing one platform, Windows, across the PC, tablet, phone, server and cloud to drive a thriving ecosystem of developers, unify the cross-device user experience, and increase agility when bringing new advancements to market.
Delivering new scenarios with life-changing improvements in how people learn, work, play and interact with one another.

The challenge here is just how generic these talking points are. They can apply to Google, Apple and Samsung as well. The monopoly position which Microsoft enjoyed is quickly eroding because there are hundreds of thousands of Android and iOS apps on the market. To make matters worse, as the world moves to the cloud, HTML5 browsers will allow cloud-based apps to be nearly as or as powerful as native OS apps.

Then there is WebRTC which will allow every browser to become the equivalent of a Skype client meaning any web user can communicate using voice and video with any other web user and no specific software will be required.

In short, this annual report letter from Microsoft is excessively generic and doesn’t explain the risks to Microsoft’s client business if they aren’t able to execute a successful tablet and mobile strategy. Moreover, as the cloud grows in importance they risk losing even more of their lock on the end-user client market.

Then there is the store strategy. It is apparent Microsoft needs bustling stores to compete with Apple and this means Surface has to be a hit and be followed up by killer phones and Ultrabooks people stand in line for.

Ballmer infers the future will be "delightful" but there is no telling if consumers will buy into this strategy. We should know more after the Surface Tablet becomes available. If it is a flop, it may not be a bad idea to start acquisition discussions with Bang & Olufsen - at least this way Redmond can't be accused of copying Apple's designs.