Recently in Unified Communications Category

VoxOx just released a new version of their "Universal Communicator", which aims to combine VoIP, video, and social networks. VoxOx aims to take on Skype by offering more social networking features. Last year, I wrote an article titled Skype Could Trump Facebook in Social Networking, but Skype still hasn't added social networking functionality.

In any event, today version 1.0.1 was released, less than a month after their initial launch. I was never able to get the Facebook integration to work, but it was a beta release, so I'm hoping they worked out the kinks.

Here are some new features:

New Additions
• Status field set to your auto-response message when away
• Facebook icons link out to friends' profiles so you can write on their wall, private message them, etc
• View Facebook contact photos from their VoxOx Profile
• Text Message window remembers Mobile Numbers
• Chat to Email window remembers emails addresses

Bug Fixes
• Call-Back (Web and SMS) fully functional
• Fixed Crash bug when ending calls
• Added default group for new contacts to be saved
• Login screen text updated to "Login Automatically"
• Web Portal login back online

Some of the major updates they are working on include a new and improved user interface, more efficient memory utilization, smoother and faster SMS functionality, enhanced Facebook integration, MySpace integration, and Outlook & Mac address book integration.

When I met with PIKA Technologies  at ITEXPO they told me support for FreePBX was coming. Well today, PIKA Technologies announced that PIKA WARP the Appliance is now compatible with the Asterisk-based FreePBX GUI (Graphical User Interface) application. I reviewed the PIKA Appliance recently and was pretty impressed with it. Having FreePBX support is a huge milestone for the PIKA Appliance. FreePBX is a popular user-friendly web application  that makes it easy to setup and configure Asterisk.

According to PIKA, "While customers often develop their own GUIs, many have told PIKA that if WARP were compatible with industry-standard GUIs like FreePBX, they would be much more inclined to adopt the portfolio. With today's announcement, PIKA has once again demonstrated its responsiveness to the needs of its user base."

"We are very pleased to have supported the effort to adopt the FreePBX application to run in the PIKA Warp environment," said Terry Atwood, vice president of sales, marketing and customer care at PIKA Technologies. "Used in many Asterisk implementations around the world, including Trixbox, FreePBX has proven its value, time and again. When the FreePBX team expressed their willingness to work with us to port to the Warp Appliance, we jumped on the opportunity."

"FreePBX has become the de facto standard for enterprise grade PBX functionality delivered to the SMB business and includes a very rich set of functionality and customization potential," said Philippe Lindheimer, open source community director of Bandwidth.com and leader of the FreePBX project. "But no GUI is complete without a wide range of hardware options to complete the package. We are delighted that PIKA can now include FreePBX in the PIKA WARP and bring our two eco-systems together."

Today's announcement from PIKA follows news of a new partnership between FreePBX and Bandwidth.com, a complete business communications provider offering advanced VoIP, Internet services and managed network services to small and medium businesses. Bandwidth.com will devote significant resources to expand the scope of FreePBX while protecting its charter to remain open source and free.

"The partnership with Bandwidth.com is great news as it gives FreePBX the support it needs to grow while ensuring it remains a free GUI for the entire open source eco-system," said David Clarke, business development manager at PIKA and director of the PIKA Warp Community. "I know the choice of Bandwidth.com was a decision that Philippe made only after months of consideration and sound input from the key developers and contributors to the FreePBX project."

Out of the box, FreePBX provides a long list of features including many typically found only in an enterprise-grade PBX, some examples are:

• Unlimited number of voicemail boxes
• "Follow me" functionality
• Ring groups and call queues
• Unlimited number of conference bridges
• Paging and intercom functionality
• and much more

The PIKA WARP Appliance product portfolio is ideal for deploying small- to medium-sized IP-PBX systems, IVR self-service systems, predictive dialling systems, fax servers and many other features typical of a traditional, purpose-built business telephone system that are often lacking in a computerized system. Compatible with a variety of open-source development platforms, including Asterisk and Linux, the Appliance offers a cost-effective alternative to traditional off-the-shelf computers and plug-in-card network connectivity in a smaller footprint.

Ribbit, which was recently acquired by BT, today rolled out its developer platform out of beta at the Adobe Max conference. Ribbits extensive APIs allow you to integrate voice communications into business applications such as Salesforce.com, CRM systems, call center applications, and even social networks.


Ribbit launched its programming platform for developers today at the Adobe Max conference. Ribbit likes to call themselves "Silicon Valley's First Phone Company". Post-acquisition, BT and Ribbit are taking the platform public with "Bring Your Own Network" which they claim is a telecom industry first. Ribbit said, "Carriers around the globe can tap into the power of the Ribbit platform and active developer community, to create new revenue streams and provide their customers with more choice and function through innovative voice-enabled applications."



As seen by the charts above, Ribbit has extensive support for industry standards, including SIP, XMPP, XML, Flash, and more. When I spoke with Ribbit Ribbit CEO Ted Griggs he compared their software platform to Amazon's cloud computing, enabling programmers to build powerful integrated telephony applications for Web sites. A proprietary softswitch (the Ribbit SmartSwitch) mediates communication across protocols, networks and devices. That includes MSN Messenger, Google Talk, Yahoo! Messenger and Skype. As I have previously written, the Ribbit API functions include call control, authentication, billing, messaging, and more. The Ribbit API abstracts the protocol inter-communication between MSN Messenger, Google Talk, and even Skype. Ribbit has reverse-engineered the Skype protocol to provide the ability for Skype users to receive calls from MSN Messenger users, Yahoo! Messenger users and Google Talk users by leveraging the Ribbit SmartSwitch.

Their most famous application to date is their use of the Ribbit API to integrate with Salesforce, a popular hosted CRM application. Also, Oracle On Demand support in Q1 2009 is forthcoming. Ribbit told me they've done a lot of work to simplify and automated the process to make it easier for developers to get started. They explained you can sign up, access the APIs and documenation, and play with them for 'free' in a sandbox before deploying and charging for the applications. When I asked if the highly successful iPhone apps sold by third parties on the Apple Store was a good analogy for their applications being developed and sold by developers they agreed that was an appropriate analogy.

BroadSoft and Sylantro Systems are two of the first VoIP providers to leverage the Ribbit platform, which Ribbit now claims has 7,500 developers.

Bandwidth.com has just made an investment in FreePBX, the popular front-end interface to Asterisk-based distros. I discussed this news with Philippe Lindheimer just a couple hours ago. One of the questions I asked was if Bandwidth.com would get "preferred treatment" within the FreePBX interface, since Bandwidth.com offers SIP trunking. Obviously, if FreePBX gives Bandwidth.com a prominent position in the GUI or they make it "easier" to configure FreePBX (i.e. plug-n-play) that could be a huge boon to Bandwidth.com Philippe said that that isn't part of the investment announcement being made today, however, that is something they are looking at.

As for the purpose of the investment, Philippe said it was mostly due to Bandwidth.com's desire to grow the market and help build the FreePBX community. The idea is that the more IP-PBXs out there, the more SIP trunks, and hence more revenue for Bandwidth.com. I have some further thoughts on this, but I'm pretty busy today and wanted to share the news.

Philippe Lindheimer said, "Part of assuring the success of FreePBX is to make sure that we continue to have strong leadership, community participation and a thriving eco-system of users and partners. I would like to announce a new partnership that will help the project tremendously. I have joined forces with Bandwidth.com as their Open Source Community Director, where we will be devoting significant resources and effort to expand the scope of FreePBX while protecting its charter to make sure it remains open and strong."

One significant piece of news is that Bandwidth.com helped protect the FreePBX's project several months ago when the FreePBX trademark (which FreePBX.org nor Phillipe never owned) was "being shopped around to parties that did not have this project's best interest in mind" according to Phillipe. Thus, Bandwidth.com preemptively purchased the trademark with Phillipe's blessing in order to assure FreePBX was not jeopardized.

You can read Phillipe's blog post about this here which has more details.

This is a call out to all bloggers out there - Rich Tehrani, my boss has extended an open invitation to bloggers interested in blogging for TMCnet.com, a leading communications/telecom site according to Alexa, Quantcast, and others.

Today, TMC launches its Blog Aid program to help people out of work stay in the public eye - in order to improve their hiring prospects in a tough economy. In the last few months, many good marketers, PR people, engineers and others who have been laid off. These potential Blog Aid bloggers have a good deal of quality commentary and information to share which could be very useful to the TMC community of online readers.

TMC is offering these new bloggers - especially those working in the communications and technology industries, a venue to voice their thoughts on the spaces where they have expertise so as to allow them access to the 2-3 million global visitors who come to TMCnet on a monthly basis.

So if you enjoy writing about communications, telecom, VoIP, wireless, unified communications, mobile, etc. and want a wide audience, go check out Rich's blog for more details.

p.s. The blogging platform is Movable Type 4.21.

Today, TMC announced the launch of NGN Magazine focused on next generation networks and how service providers and carriers can build these networks and what they will need to know to maximize savings and ARPU (average revenue per user).

"We're in an interesting time," says TMC President and Group Publisher, Rich Tehrani. No, he's not referring to the American political scene or the chaotic American economy. Rich is referring to Next Generation Networks, which Rich believes will be critical to the future of service providers and carriers. Certainly, in these tough economic times, squeezing the most efficiency and most value-add services is critical. Verizon is probably the best example of that. They've been investing billions in their fiber-based FiOS service which supports high-speed Internet, voice, and TV/video/HDTV.  They are no doubt also looking to tie in their considerable wireless/cellular network with their FiOS network to offer customers a competitive advantage over competing solutions.

In his video interview with TMCnet Group Managing Editor Erik Linask, Rich discusses NGN Magazine. [click to visit video link]



The topics TMC's NGN magazine will address, some of which Rich mentions in the video interview:

» How do you deploy new services and applications ?
» What technology should you consider ?
» How do you integrate new technologies with legacy elements?

Erik points out that a lot of publishing companies have been cutting down on staff and even folding print publications. Rich addresses this point by pointing out that 2-3 million executives visit tmcnet.com to read the content digitally. He also discusses how TMC offers digital (PDF) versions of the print magazines which greatly reduces costs. Thousands of people subscribe to the digital PDF format.

While all facets of the economy seem to be slowing down, TMC continues to grow -- not only launching a new magazine, but recently adding new telecom/wireless industry talent such as Carl Ford, Scott Kargman, and more. Newspapers may die, print magazines may fold, but good information and news will always be needed. And where there is a need for good information, people will pay for it. Publishing companies which are nimble enough to adjust to the trend towards online news dissemination will survive, while those that can't will die.

Case in point is the NY Times, which must deliver $400 million to lenders in May of 2009 or face bankruptcy. But if you're a New York Times fan, don't worry. I'm sure President-elect Barrack Obama will add them to the $700+ billion bailout. Can't have the NY Times go bankrupt, can we? Don't answer that question...

As one of my sources told me a few days ago, IBM and Microsoft planned on offering Sametime and OCS 2007 integration to be announced at VoiceCon. Three days ago I wrote:

Rumor has it that Microsoft and/or IBM will announce integration between Office Communications Server 2007 and IBM's Lotus Sametime "Unified Telephony" platform at this week's VoiceCon show. If true, this would combine approximately 20 million Sametime users with Microsoft's fast growing OCS 2007 user base creating the largest unified communications user base.

Well, it just hit the newswires. At Voicecon, IBM and Microsoft announced that IBM Sametime and OCS will offer Interdomain Federation in Q4 of 2008, using SIP/SIMPLE.

The support will require an update to the Sametime Gateway 8.0.2. It will support OCS 2007 and OCE 2007 R2.

I'm always a bit skeptical of VoIP security vulnerabilities discovered by firms which sell security products. Nevertheless, I thought it was worth sharing this bit of news.

Update: Microsoft responded that VoIPShield's test is "on a non-secure implementation of OCS, which you would have to disable as we are secure with a default installation."

See, that's why I was "a bit skeptical"!

VoIPshield Laboratories, the research division of VoIPshield Systems Inc., is making its first-ever announcement in a new category of research related to security vulnerabilities in VoIP and Unified Communications (UC) systems. These vulnerabilities affect applications that use media stream protocols like RTP (Real-time Transport Protocol), a popular standardized packet format for delivering audio and instant messaging over the Internet.

The Microsoft products affected are Office Communications Server 2007, Office Communicator and Windows Live Messenger. These products deliver software-powered VoIP, presence, instant messaging and audio/video/Web conferencing functionality to end users. Microsoft estimates that over 250 million computers worldwide run these applications. All use RTP to deliver the content of the message; therefore all are vulnerable to this class of attack.

"Most of the attention in enterprise VoIP/UC security has been paid to the control channel, where SIP and other signalling protocols are used," said Ken Kousky, CEO of security research and analysis firm IP3 and advisor to the VoIP Lab at Illinois Institute of Technology. "Until now, the media stream has been largely ignored by the security community as a source of malicious activity. But attacks from these vectors have the potential to be dangerously persistent and widespread."

The Microsoft vulnerabilities announced today, if exploited, cause a Denial of Service (DoS) condition against not only the stated applications but the entire desktop environment.

"Today's announcements are just the tip of the iceberg," said Andriy Markov, director of VoIPshield Labs. "Although they are specific to Microsoft's applications, similar flaws exist in other VoIP vendors' products. And many other media stream attacks exist that have more severe implications than service availability. We're presently validating new research that shows an attacker can gain unauthorized access to an unsuspecting user's laptop by manipulating the packets of a VoIP phone call. We believe that these attacks can even be made to traverse a PSTN gateway."

Under its Responsible Disclosure Policy, VoIPshield confidentially discloses full details of the vulnerabilities to the affected vendors, and works with them to facilitate the development of application fixes. Details of the vulnerabilities are not publicly disclosed.

Securing the media stream is particularly challenging because once the messaging session is established, the flow of voice packets is not always monitored and managed by the call server.

"Media traffic, whether it's voice or video, can travel peer-to-peer," Kousky added. "Security practitioners have historically considered blocking peer-to-peer traffic as the best protection practice. Unfortunately, for voice packets that strategy doesn't work and so careful consideration has to be given to the placement of the protection mechanisms within the network."

"VoIP and Unified Communications represent not only new technologies, but new paradigms in the way information is communicated and consumed," said Rick Dalmazzi, VoIPshield's president & CEO. "The result is brand new vectors of attack against the entire corporate IT infrastructure. Companies must start now to educate themselves in this new area of security. VoIPshield has been working exclusively in VoIP and UC security since 2004 and has compiled a number of assessment and protection techniques and products for enterprise networks."

Effective immediately, customers of VoIPshield's VoIPguardTM VoIP/UC Intrusion Prevention System can download the new signatures using the VoIPshield UpdateTM subscription service. VoIPguard contains over 500 VoIP/UC specific signatures to detect and prevent malicious signalling and media traffic.

In April, VoIPshield was named one of five "Cool Vendors in Infrastructure Protection for 2008" by Gartner. In October VoIPshield was named one of the "Top 50 Canadian Companies" by Red Herring.

Cisco Systems unveiled a supercharged router called the ASR 9000, which is capable of moving 6.4 terabytes per second of traffic. The router is aimed at service providers with next-generation networks which plan to run bandwidth heavy services such as video, IPTV, mobile broadband, and more. With the explosion of Youtube videos, and other bandwidth-hungry apps, service providers are looking to stay ahead of the bandwidth demand curve. The ASR 9000 hopes to address that need with the ability to support the future "Zettabyte era". According to CRN, "The Cisco Aggregation Services Router 9000 Series (ASR 9000) is designed to be the carrier Ethernet foundation for the "Zettabyte era," said Doug Webster, Cisco's senior director of service provider marketing. According to Webster, Cisco expects IP traffic to reach half of a Zettabyte by 2012."

Cisco's Pankaj Patel, senior vice president and general manager of the Cisco Service Provider Technology Group called and left me a message stating that their new hardware took four years and a whopping $200 million to develop.

The ASR 9000 router is capable of transmitting data at a rate of 6.4 trillion bits per second, and it has 10 times the bandwidth capacity of Cisco's ASR 1000 router.

Pankaj Patel also told the San Jones Mercury Times, "We truly believe consumer IP traffic will more than quadruple by 2012," He said the new router is capable of delivering 200 movies per second or 250,000 MP3s per second.

Price: It's expected to go for around $80,000.

Rumor has it that Microsoft and/or IBM will announce integration between Office Communications Server 2007 and IBM's Lotus Sametime "Unified Telephony" platform at this week's VoiceCon show. If true, this would combine approximately 20 million Sametime users with Microsoft's fast growing OCS 2007 user base creating the largest unified communications user base.

There are ways of getting OCS and Sametime to integrate via 3rd party gateways, however it is somewhat limiting. I don't believe you can do video for instance.

If Sametime and OCS can interoperate and offer IM/presence, voice, and video, that would be HUGE.