Recently in xo Category

Listened to XO to introduce Enterprise SIP (ESIP) to the Channel today. This offering is very targeted. Enterprise SIP is designed for multi-location customers such as Retail and Restaurant chains that are looking to get rid of PRI's.  

ESIP will be for high capacity connections with the minimum connection of 10MB at the hub (or HQ) for aggregated voice traffic. 

Essentially it is a SIP trunk (at 10MB) that will take all of the local and long distance traffic - inbound and outbound - from the branch offices across an MPLS (or other private network) through one or two hub circuits. 

Here's how it works.

You connect all of the offices together via a private network or MPLS architecture. Then you port all of the numbers to the SIP Trunking of XO's Enterprise SIP Service. The trunk will plug into an IP-PBX or an SBC and handle all of the voice traffic on the company network. All inbound and outbound voice traffic will utilize the ESIP Trunk.

A 10MB pipe will handle about 100 G.711 call streams (more or less). That means about 500 to 1000 extensions depending on the phone usage of the employees.

XO will even give Virtual-NXX numbers off this trunk. Although toll bypass is not allowed. 

The thing that surprised me the most was how specific the offering is. It's isn't for everyone. It was designed with a very particular market segment in mind - namely retail and restaurant chains.

The ESIP offering is designed to terminate on a Session Border Controller, IP-PBX or a Fax Server. 

Need to UPDATE that this is my take-away from the call. XO has many VoIP products and they want to match up the best solution for each customer. The ESIP is specifically for Multi-Location, MPLS-enabled customers. Not many companies need or can afford a Session Border Controller, so to me that is an indicator of the type of Enterprise that this offering i sdesigned for.

Speaking with Peter Davis, Partner Channel Manager in the Southeast for XO, about MPLS and HIPAA. XO recently held a webinar describing how their MPLS Solution can enable healthcare organizations to be HIPAA compliant.

The wording here is important. Transport is neither compliant or not. It is the end devices and users that must be HIPAA compliant. In other words, how the data is handled end-to-end has to be compliant, not the pieces and parts. 

When speaking with Hospital HIPAA Administrators it is important to remember that part of compliance is security and part is procedure. The procedure part has to do with how all medical records (physical and virtual) are handled and secured, whether on-premise, in transit, at a data center, ona  server or in a file cabinet.

With off-site data storage, the best solution for access is a private line, a Layer 2 VPN, or an MPLS network. Why? Segmentation of traffic. Security of data flow. Less chance for a lapse in security. 

The data needs to be securely stored and backed up. EMR firms have to sell a fairly expensive proposition due to all the safeguards and redundancy that goes with accessing medical records from a remote server. 

In many ways, the telecom agent can sell numerous pieces of the puzzle through XO (or other carriers or VAR's). 

• The transport - private line, metro Ethernet, Layer 2 VPN, or MPLS.
• The data center - collocation for servers and networking gear
• Data storage and backup

HIPAA is more involved with procedures in place (and to be followed) on the storage, access and security of medical records  than on the technology used to secure, store or transport those same medical records.

If you are looking for more info on MPLS, XO has an MPLS video series on YouTube and TCA has a stored webinar for its members on its website.

SUTUS sells an Office-in-the-box solution for small business. For 25 and under employees, the Sutus Business Central 200 is a file server, email server, router, wireless access point, and phone system. The BC200 has gotten an upgrade. 

• New User Interface: enhanced Flex technology supports seamless installation, management and use of the Business Central 200, onsite and/or remotely.
• Enhanced Desktop Install Tools: enables the set-up of desktops, VPN clients and mail clients in a matter of minutes.
• Enhanced Network Interoperability: the appliance now can seamlessly co-exist within a customer's legacy local area networks; including active directory, hosted exchange, and existing internet routers.
• VoIP Interoperability: ITSP partners added to the VoIP interop menu now include Bandwidth.com, Airespring, Excel and XO Communications.

It's the telephony upgrade that caught my eye: Call park / retrieve and directed pick-up. Older key systems use call park and most Hosted PBX systems cannot emulate that feature. (Aastra has a PBX that can). Other features include:

• Overhead and handset paging
• Open / closed call flows
• Enhanced directory
• Ability to manage Polycom handsets through user interface

SUTUS is distributed by ScanSource and NETX.

Tech Data's Senior Product Sales Champion for UC was at the event last night. I spent a few minutes chatting with him about his position, but couldn't really get a definition of UC out of him. Polycom and tele-presence are what he pushes - to me that's not really UC. HD Voice? No we leave that up to Polycom and the vendors. Seems even a tech company has a problem wrapping the head around Unified Communications. (UC doesn't mean the latest gadgets).

XO has some components to build a UC bundle - overlay IVR, Broadsoft SIP Trunking, some straight forward Hosted PBX (with a limited feature set), and Hosted Exchange for the email integration piece.

If the UC Champion thinks UC is tele-presence and video conferencing, what does that say about well defined the term is in the Industry?

I received an invite yesterday from XO to come down to the Tech Data Expo at the Don Cesar Hotel in St. Petersburg FL. ADTRAN shared the booth with XO at this event. Surprisedly, the other two carriers that distribute through Tech Data had assigned booth space, but were absent. 

XO is a good fit for Tech Data. While I think the XO catalog is too large to know well - wireless, hosting, IP, VOIP, transport, collocation and more - the VAR's at Tech Data vary so much in what they do and what would complement their business that the wide selection helps - IF you can get in front of them and remind them throughout the year how they can take advantage of the additional revenue stream. 

For many VAR's the advantage of XO through Tech Data is that there's no contract (especially for those VAR's already under contract with Ma or Pa Bell) and with Tech Data as the "master agency", it isn't likely you need to worry about your residual check.  (And now that XO has converted their debt, it is in a good position going forward, which other debt laden CLEC's can't say).

Many VAR's are already in the PBX space and were asking about SIP. I wasn't sure if they actually grasp the concept of SIP or that they just know enough to be dangerous. The biggest difference between a PRI and a SIP Trunk is Inter-Operability. PRI is a standard with two available configurations that work with almost all the PBX's on the market. SIP Trunk is a spec - a collection of a lot of RFC's that have to work together just right to provide dial-tone. Broadsoft, the softswitch that XO is using, has tested inter-operability on many IP-PBX systems. Not so for other SIP Trunk vendors. So before you sell that SIP Trunk make certain that the IP-PBX model will inter-op with your SIP trunking vendor. It's a mess if it won't work.

Voxeo acquired IMified this week. What is IMified?  IVR for IM.

XO's IVR service earned an award. (BTW, agents can team up with XO to sell IVR service as an overlay).

Ifbyphone is all about IVR in the Cloud.

ACD and IVR are two reasons that small businesses move to VoIP. It is far cheaper to pay for the hosted service monthly than to buy an on-premise hardware solution that can provide it.  It looks like the race is on to make Mitel, Avaya, and Nortel premise equipment redundant or obsolete as you will get up-to-date platforms with maintenance bought as a monthly service, usable by your employees and customers any where in the world.

By accident, I ran across JobVent today. On first examination, it's just one more Web 2.0 forum for employees to complain about their bosses. AT&T has 5 companies - 4 are rated as bad. Cbeyond and XO are on there. Verizon is on there with 6 listings - VZW gets good marks. How is your company doing?

I'll be in Ft. Lauderdale on Oct. 21 Oct. 23 to keynote a partner luncheon for ADTRAN and XO. The content is based on where the indirect channel is heading in the next couple of years and what the value proposition is for both kinds of resellers - telecom agents and hardware VAR's. How many times will I say Converged? XO is giving every attendee a copy of my book, SELLECOM.

Over at isp-bw, we spent an evening discussing XO's future. With Icahn as the owner of 60% of the stock, 90% of the debt, and 6 board seats, he has the company and any minor shareholder over the barrel. R2 is a minority shareholder who warned Icahn via open letter that if XO files Bankruptcy, they would sue him personally for dereliction of fiduciary duty. On paper, XO looks good. Assets, cash, EBITA. But in reality, well, not so good. $387M in dent is due to Icahn soon. The company and assets have been re-organized twice. And they have no focus.

PAETEC's CEO, Arunas Chesonis, thinks making the Billion Dollar Club as a CLEC means something. It hasn't meant much so far. Genuity hit it in $1B in 2000 and its $4B in debt made it collapse. ICI (Intermedia) hit $1B and sold out in 2001 to MCI to satisfy the $3B in short term debt. Genuity owned assets (fiber and AS#1); Intermedia had Digex.

XO has fiber and wireless spectrum. PAETEC has Allworx and the McLeod fiber. Neither one has spent time developing a region to the point that they have a 15% share. The problem is the idea that you want to be national so that you can get the big accounts. What are there, maybe 10,000 companies buying enetrprise level services? And they have choice: Ma Bell, VZ, Qwest, Sprint, Level3, GlobalCrossing and on another level Masergy, InterNAP, Savvis, AboveNet and others. That's enough. The key is to be deep, not wide.

It costs money to go wide. It costs less money to go deep. It is also more profitable.

A further point is that Broadwing was at $879M in revenue with about $125M in losses before L3 bought them in 2003 for $1.4B. Half of Broadwing's revenue came from wholesale on its 19000 miles of fiber. I just don't see how BIG makes you better. Sprint is a prime example. Big means you can't take care of your customer properly (which is what Arunas says is how he built Paetec). So how is Bigger better?