Unified Communications

Broadsoft Acquires Rival Sylantro

December 29, 2008

In what could portend several acquisitions in the VoIP space, Broadsoft has acquired rival competitor Sylantro Systems, both makers of softswitches and both heavily involved in carrier infrastructure, IMS, and converged services. TMCnet's Greg Galitzine has the full details on the acquisition.

With the global slowing economy, even the VoIP industry which has had exponential growth over the last 13 years, is being affected by the global downturn. No doubt we will see more consolidation within the VoIP space and likely a few bankruptcies as well.

I for one can't believe it's been 13 years since VoIP was first invented. It's amazing to think I've been covering the VoIP industry for over a decade, when most people have only heard of VoIP in the last 5 years or so.

Posted in TMCnet, Unified Communications, VoIP

trixbox CE vs. Asterisk Downloads

December 23, 2008

As you may have read, Digium announced a sharp rise in Asterisk downloads for 2008 registering in a whopping 1.5 million downloads for 2008. That got me thinking just how does Asterisk & AsteriskNOW compare with Fonality's trixbox CE distro? Arguably trixbox CE is the either the #1 or the #2 downloaded Asterisk-based distribution. But are they #1 or #2?

Posted in Asterisk, Linux, TMCnet, Unified Communications, VoIP

TMC & Digium Announce Educational program for Digium|Asterisk World

December 15, 2008

Some good news from my company TMC and Digium, the founder of Asterisk that I thought I'd share. If you're an Asterisk fan, you need to be at Asterisk World, which is co-located with the #1 VoIP tradeshow in the U.S., namely TMC's ITEXPO.

Technology Marketing Corporation (TMC) and Digium, the Asterisk Company, today announced the educational program for Digium|Asterisk World, scheduled to take place February 2-4, 2009 in Miami. The event is collocated with TMC's ITEXPO East 2009.

TMC and Digium also announced that although the conference content and exhibiting opportunities are more than 90 percent complete, additional opportunities remain for interested Digium partners.
Digium|Asterisk World at ITEXPO is the conference that addresses "Everything Asterisk" for business users, resellers and executive decision-makers. The initial conference sessions featured in the program include:

1.

Posted in Asterisk, ITEXPO, SIP, TMCnet, Unified Communications, VoIP

ADTRAN Launches n-Command MSP - Remote VoIP Management Network Tool

December 15, 2008

Interesting new product from from ADTRAN whose aim is to simplify remote management of VoIP networks with their n-Command MSP. It sounds very similar to NetQoS Unified Communications Monitor 2.0 I wrote about last month, except NetQoS UC Monitor 2.0 is designed for Cisco UC and Microsoft OCS environments, while the ADTRAN offering seems targeted exclusively to managing ADTRAN NetVanta or Total Access converged networking solutions.

One of its core features is centralized collection and reporting for Voice Quality Monitoring (VQM) for QoS monitoring. The n-Command MSP system includes an ADTRAN NetVanta Server 450 on a compact, 1U, 19-inch rackmount server, which can support up to 5,000 remotely managed devices.For ADTRAN VoIP shops this network management platform sounds like a no-brainer, but I'd have to check it out in more detail to be sure.

Posted in SIP, TMCnet, Unified Communications, VoIP

Nortel Web.Alive = Second Life for Business

December 15, 2008

Rich Tehrani has a very interesting post about Nortel's foray into virtualized business meetings. Think Second Life virtual world meets business world...

Rich participated in a virtual world demo with Nortel where they showed him web.alive. This business-oriented virtual world looks eerily similar to Second Life, including the 3D avatars, and 3D world but under the covers it sports something else - namely 3D audio powered by DiamondWare 3D stereoVoIP technology.

Posted in TMCnet, Technology and Science, Unified Communications, Video Conferencing, VoIP

Grandstream GXV3005 Video Phone

December 11, 2008

Grandstream just announced the GXV3005 IP video phone is coming this month. The GXV3005 features an additional FXO port and is part of the GXV3000 IP video product line series.

The GXV3005 features the same design and all of the functionality as the GXV3000 model, but it comes with the advanced versatility of an FXO PSTN line port, which enables customers to receive both video telephony service over an IP network and their home land-line. One thing I like about Grandsteam is they follow industry standards, such as SIP, but also H.263 & H.264, so in theory their video phone will work with other H.263/H.264 compliant video phones. We don't need a videophone war, after all.

Posted in SIP, TMCnet, Unified Communications, Video Conferencing, VoIP

Ditch Desktop IP phone to Save Money?

December 9, 2008

With a slowing global economy, one of the cost-cutting measures desired by IT personnel appears to be the desktop phone, including desktop IP phones. That at least according to an OnRelay survey that shows 88% of cost-conscious IT Professionals would ditch the desktop phone. Apparently, the desire for for mobile working makes desktop tools a low priority expense. I should point out that OnRelay offers a hosted PBX solution with mobile phone only extensions, so you might think this survey has a conflict of interest.

Posted in Mobile Phones, Unified Communications, VoIP, Wireless

Fonality Launches PBXtra Unified Agent on Salesforce.com's Force.com AppExchange

December 9, 2008

Back in September I wrote about Fonality's trixbox Unified Agent Edition (UAE) and how it can automatically match all inbound and outbound calls with the corresponding record in salesforce.com's AppExchange, and call data is captured and logged. Apparently, this was still a yet-to-be-announced product I wrote about that resulted in a call from Fonality's CEO Chris Lyman asking how I found out about it. Woops, my bad, Chris.

Well, today, Fonality has officially launched UAE.

Posted in Asterisk, Avaya, Call Center and CRM, Reviews, TMCnet, Unified Communications, VoIP

Digium Responds to FBI Vhishing Security Warning about Asterisk

December 9, 2008

A few days ago the FBI's Internet Crimes Complaint Center (IC3) issued an unclear warning that says versions of Asterisk software are vulnerable to vhishing (voice phishing) attacks, but didn't say which versions, but causing a flurry of news activity on VoIP news sites, tech sites, and blogs.

It all started with this warning from the IC3:

New Technique Utilizing Private Branch Exchange (PBX) Systems To Conduct Vishing Attacks

The FBI has received information concerning a new technique used to conduct vishing attacks. The recent attacks were conducted by hackers exploiting a security vulnerability in Asterisk software.

My esteemed colleagues Rich Tehrani and Greg Galitzine did some research to find out what the story was, including contacting Digium's John Todd.

Here's Rich's take:

Before commenting I waited to hear back from Digium's John Todd who explained that there were some methodology and editorial process issues in this alert - basically no one checked with Digium before going public. As it turns out, after checking with Digium, the FBI quickly revised their statement and everything is fine.

The details are that there was a bug which Digium found in March of 2008 and subsequently patched in version 1.2 and 1.4.

Posted in Asterisk, TMCnet, Unified Communications, VoIP

Asterisk-based VPN in a Flash Mobile Telephony Appliance

December 8, 2008

Nerd Vittles (Ward Mundy) is the man! He just combined the popular Acer Aspire One NetBook featuring the powerful Intel Atom N270(1.60GHz) processor along with Fedora 10 and his Asterisk-based distro. Nerd just may have cooked up the perfect low-cost, powerful, GUI-rich (low overhead KDE), and portable Asterisk-based appliance! Now you can take your phone system on the road while driving, on the plane, etc.

Posted in Asterisk, SIP, TMCnet, Unified Communications, VoIP

Previous 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 ... 48 Next

VoIP & Gadgets Blog

Unified Communications