Alan Percy : The SIP Invite
Alan Percy
| Observations by Alan D. Percy on VoIP enabling technology, industry and our personal reach for success.

Phone or No Phone? The UC Debate.

I participated in an interesting and animated discussion during the opening night of this most recent Lync Conference in Toronto Canada that...

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Vonage Mobile Adds Video Calls

After 12 years as a voice-only business, Vonage is finally making its first foray into video conferencing with the announcement of free...

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"Where do IMS and WebRTC Intersect?"

The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is an architectural framework for delivering IP multimedia services. It is based primarily on SIP as...

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WebRTC Webinar Q&A #2 "Why WebRTC when we have Skype?"

“Why  WebRTC when we have Skype”?” This is a really good question.   After all, Skype is the dominant real-time communications technology...

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What if All VoIP Carriers Were Connected Transparate Style?

"What if every carrier could be in direct contact with all other carriers on this planet? Sounds like a big idea ......

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Big Changes at Broadvox

Just over a year ago, big changes happened at Broadvox. Bruce Chatterley, who was CEO of Speakeasy until MegaPath absorbed Speakeasy and...

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That Sound You Heard Was The Hard Drive Market Crumbling

Flash memory has already made major inroads in data centers and on Macs and PCs – augmenting hard disks by prefetching...

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Phone or No Phone? The UC Debate.

April 19, 2013

I participated in an interesting and animated discussion during the opening night of this most recent Lync Conference in Toronto Canada that started with “Is the desktop phone doomed?”  

First, let’s clarify that there are situations where phones are mandatory for public safety reasons – school class rooms, elevators, emergency call stations, hotel pools and other spaces that are required by either building or fire codes.  Phones are “expected” items in conference rooms, shared office space locations, un-staffed lobbies and similar locations. 

Enterprise Connect 2013 - Is a UC Battle Over TCO Brewing?

March 29, 2013

By Alan D. Percy, Sr. Director of Marketing

Now that the dust has settled after Enterprise Connect 2013, and I’ve had a chance to both reflect on what I heard and download the slides (to make sure my memory was correct), it’s time to talk about the looming “Battle over TCO”.

During the conference Robin Gareiss, EVP and Founder of Nemertes Research presented an eye-opening session titled “Making the Business Case for IP Telephony and Unified Communications”, which included some analytical research they had done on the actual cost of Unified Communications systems from a number of different vendors.  Robin presented the results of a Nemertes survey, finding that NEC and ShoreTel had the lowest total first year costs for IP Telephony, while Microsoft had significantly higher first year costs. 

Microsoft Lync Sessions at Enterprise Connect

March 13, 2013

Microsoft Lync Logo" width="300" height="153" align="right" />We’ve got a lot to look forward to at the upcoming Enterprise Connect – surely Microsoft Lync will be a big focus of attention at this ever-growing meeting of communications professionals.  A few events we’ve been coordinating with Microsoft, Verizon, Plantronics and ScanSource Communications during the event:

  • Join Verizon, AudioCodes and ScanSource Communications for a lunch buffet session titled “SIP Trunking and UC – Better together?”. Enjoy lunch and engage in a discussion about Lync in managed service deployments with SIP Trunking. Lunch is Tuesday, March 19th from 11:30 AM – 1:00 PM.
  • Enjoy a drink and hors d’oeuvres after a long day on Tuesday at the “One Voice for Lync Launch Party” – hosted by AudioCodes – it starts at 6:30 PM and will give you an opportunity to network with other Lync users, partners and industry leaders in Unified Communications.
  • On Wednesday morning, join Marty Parker from UC Strategies and Joseph Donald from Microsoft for a breakfast session titled “Lync 2013 – Where can it take you now?”.

Lync Conference 2013 - A Look Back

March 7, 2013

Now that the first-ever Lync Conference is behind us, some reflective thoughts and observations:

Far exceeding the organizer’s expectations, the Lync Conference sold out weeks before the event with over 1,000 paid attendees.  (Based on the badge swapping in the hotel foyer, there must have been another 300 people “around the fringes”.)   The event was an interesting mix of roughly 1/3 end-customers, another 1/3 resellers/partners and 1/3 vendors, analysts and press - all mixed into hours of great sessions, keynotes and exposition space.  What does this mean? 

CES - My "What in the World?" Award winner is....

January 16, 2013


By now you've all heard about all the cool techno-gizmos at CES - yeah, been there done that. When I go to CES, I try to find the weirdest and most unusual product for my annual "What in the world is that?" award.

This year, the 2013 award goes to PTP Licensing, who was showing a "Plasmic Transition Process Engine".

Plasma Transition Engine prototype at CES

The mad-scientist-looking gentleman working the booth explained that the engine works using inert gases in a opposed configuration two piston engine (like most Subarus have), with sparks from four spark plugs in each cylinder causing a plasma "gas burst" inside the cyclinders to drive the engine. The plasma is contained using strong magnetic fields and does not release any radiation or other emissions to the air (other than the inert gas).

The engine reportedly runs cool, uses little gas to operate and is very efficient.

Only issue is, I couldn't figure out how it would fit in my time travel DeLorean ?



www.ptplicensing.com
















Voice Enabling the Cloud with Microsoft Lync 2013

December 5, 2012


By Alan D. Percy, Senior Director of Marketing NA, AudioCodes

Many resellers have seen success with Voice-enabled Microsoft Lync 2010, selling equipment and services into the mid-market and enterprises where businesses tend to have their own data centers or private cloud infrastructure.  Meanwhile, deploying voice-enabled Lync to the small business market (under 250 seats) has been difficult, requiring dedicated server pool infrastructure for each business, resulting in high overhead costs.

During a recent AudioCodes-hosted webinar, Roy King, Business Planner at Microsoft and Larry Clarkson, CTO, AudioCodes addressed this challenge and walked us through the new hosting options available with the recently released Lync 2013.


WebRTC - Further progress to "dumb pipes?"

December 3, 2012


By Alan Percy, Senior Director of Marketing for AudioCodes

I spent part of this last week reading and listening in to some of the post-conference comments about WebRTC.   For those of you that haven’t caught the bug yet, WebRTC is about building a unified media capability into web browsers, the goal being to eliminate the existing dozens of incompatible specialized client software packages (like Skype).

After wading through all the technical bits, the bigger picture came into focus – this is real trouble for hosted VoIP application and traditional TDM service providers. 


Astricon - A sparkle in your eye and commitment

October 29, 2012


As I weave my way through the Atlanta Airport, thoughts of this week’s Astricon begin to sink in.  Astricon is the annual Mecca for upwards of 800 developers, enterprises and service providers that have built (or planning to build) solutions based on the popular Asterisk open source software. 

Mark Spencer, the original developer of Asterisk has made quite a career out of his IP-PBX-like donation to the open source community – feeding untold developers that have built creative applications and business solutions.  


SIP Trunking Tour - What did we learn?

August 3, 2012

This summer I was fortunate to participate as a speaker and co-sponsored a traveling road-show along with Sonus and Cisco to Las Vegas, Chicago, San Francisco and New York City, spending a day in each city - educating a variety of businesses on SIP Trunking.

The format of the events included a educational track, presented by either David Stein, Stein Technology Group or Jim Allen, Independent Consultant.  After these presentations, the audience and sponsors participated in an extended open discussion/Q&A session, diving deeper into SIP Trunking implementations.  After the discussion sessions, a panel of end-customers with real-world experience took over, sharing their stories of both success and headaches.

One of the real benefits as a presenter in this type of event is hearing from real end-users, learning about their issues, concerns and plans for the future.  Here's a few real eye-opening observations:

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Lync at TechEd - Coming out of the Shadows

June 14, 2012

Today wraps up Microsoft Tech 2012 in Orlando, the major education conference targeted at IT professionals using Microsoft products and related technologies.  Microsoft Lync was featured in the Office Pavilion within Microsoft’s central area.  In addition to the Microsoft stand, the usual collection of device and gateway vendors were exhibiting including AudioCodes, Polycom, Plantronics, Jabra, Juniper and others.

During this week, I made an extra effort to roughly half of the 12 educational sessions on Microsoft Lync. 

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