Don't Clam UP about CCS

I was on the road most of last week and the food was mediocre at best. I was quite anxious to eat some of my own cooking this weekend. Friday was a chopped brisket with coleslaw sandwich. The brisket was hickory smoked and served on Boudin's sourdough sandwich rolls. If you have never been to San Francisco and had one of these as either a sandwich or bowl for clam chowder, you are missing a great food delight. Boudin makes probably the best sourdough in the country. Sunday resulted in the recipe of the week. After much thought, I decided I wanted clams and pasta. I also wanted to create something unique. This dish uses my home cured and smoked bacon, clams, fettuccine and Kalamata olives. I thought long and hard about adding the olives but they accent the briny flavor of the clams perfectly. One small note, you will need to pull a cup or two of that basic tomato sauce or Italian gravy from the freezer. I keep some at the ready for days like this. The recipe of the week is Fettuccine with Clams.

Quarterly Channel Sales Meeting

It is always interesting to have the entire sales team in for the quarterly meeting. The agenda is pretty much the same each quarter. Go over the results of the quarter, review the pipeline and provide an update on the activities of the support organizations, marketing and any new regarding the company. We also have one learning exercise where the team can win money by either performing well or knowing a set of facts. This week's meeting will be no different.

There is a lot on confusion and misinformation with regard to IP communications. One of the reasons I started this blog was to address that in particular. For example, I still find it very annoying we have companies that refer to concurrent call sessions or talk paths as trunks. Even in the TDM world, it would have been extremely rare for a trunk to consist of a single circuit. Why this concept invaded SIP Trunking makes no sense to me.

A SIP Trunk is a virtual data link or communications facility that can contain any number of simultaneous calls or talk paths. The number of calls or talks paths is limited only by the available bandwidth. However, most of last week, I dealt with people that referred to multiple trunks when they were talking about talk paths. Moreover, there is a fairly well known IP PBX vendor that does the same thing. Once they called asking for eight demo SIP trunks. Since their literature does not include the concept of concurrent call sessions (CCSs), I assumed they wanted a single SIP Trunk with eight CCS. No, they wanted eight trunks with two CCS each. Go figure!

Even the Broadvox channel managers use the terms trunk and CCS incorrectly. They know better, but fall into a common trap of using the same vernacular as their partners and customer base. I understand the reason but it does not make me happy.

What does make me happy is the recent forecast by Frost and Sullivan that the North American VoIP Access and SIP Trunking Services market earned revenues of $717.3 million in 2009, but could reach $3.9 billion in 2016.

I'll need a very successful sales meeting to get a majority share of that.