January 2008 Archives

If you recall back in October, I posted a blog article about the intersection between personal and professional "friends" on Facebook and other social networking sites.

I noticed this morning that USAtoday picked up on the issue and published a lengthy article about the issue.  It's good reading and expands on what I have been sensing would be an issue going forward.  Fortunately, it sounds like Facebook is adding functionality to their offering that will allow creation of "circles", providing some insulation between our social and profession lives.

After yesterday's webinar on fax, I'm overwhelmed. 

When we were developing the plans and presentation materials for yesterdays webinar titled "Fax - SIP+T.38 to the Rescue", our expectations were that a few "fax gurus" would join in and we would have a small very focused 20 - 30 person session on a rather deep dark secret of the industry.  Can you imagine my surprise when during the first few minutes of the session the participant count kept climbing and climbing to over 160 people!  Talk about standing room only. 

After 45 minutes of presentation and another almost 30 minutes of Q/A, I was toast.  There were some fantastic questions that I was able to address, but because of time limitations, we were unable to get to dozens more great questions.

The session moderator, Erik Linask published a great summary of the webinar.

What does this mean?  It can mean only one thing - there is serious pain in the VoIP industry when it comes to delivering reliable fax services and people are looking for solutions.

So what can I do to help close the gap?  I've decided to use this forum to provide both a recap of the webinar and address the many questions you in the audience posed both during and after the session.  This concept of tying both the webinar and companion blog together is a new experiment, so let's give it a try.  If you have questions and didn't get a chance to pose them during the session, you can send them to me at: alan.percy@audiocodes.com

I'm starting to work on the whitepaper version of the presentation, posting pieces in this venue as they are ready.   Once the completed whitepaper is ready for download, we'll be posting it on the TMC whitepaper library.

In the mean time, the abstract for yesterday's webinar:

Fax continues to be a key communications medium for many enterprises and service providers alike. Financial institutions, real-estate, government, law offices, and many others still depend heavily on fax to transfer thousands of documents daily into and from business-critical document management and ERP systems. Many service providers and enterprises have only recently recognized the challenges associated with delivering reliable fax documents over IP networks. What are the reliability issues with fax over G.711 and how can SIP and T.38 improve the reliability? Is there a way to eliminate the expensive dedicated fax boards? How can legacy TDM fax systems connect to SIP trunking carriers? How is fax document security addressed? What is the future of fax? This session will address these questions and many others, showing how SIP and T.38 can be leveraged to create reliable and scalable fax solutions for both enterprises and service providers.

For those that missed the live event, you can listen to the on-demand version at any time.

This last week was very successful and action packed week for a number of our partners, AudioCodes staff and myself at the AudioCodes Global Channel Partner Meeting.   The event brought together 220 of the leading AudioCodes global channels, leading ISV partners and key AudioCodes executives for two days of introductions, information sharing and a little socializing beautiful and historical Jerusalem.

Shabtai Adlersberg, AudioCodes CEO during his opening keynote

 A key component of the agenda was presentations from our executives and product management teams, reviewing where we are and where we are going in the future.  The presentations included some fantastic vision on how AudioCodes sees the evolution of the communications infrastructure and a number of new products and services specifically designed to address this evolution.    

Scott Wharton from Broadsoft

We were fortunate to also hear from a number of leading industry thinkers, including Scott Wharton from Broadsoft and Haim Fried from Google who came to share their thoughts.   I was most impressed by the range of customers that came to present their case studies, showing how they put us to the test and won new business with AudioCodes.

A range of products and partners were highlighted in the Expo

 The conference Expo included a host of key partners, showing their software applications and services to the long list of channel partners and distributors that attended the event.  AudioCodes showed a number of enhanced intelligent media gateways, media server platforms with video and conferencing capabilities, plus a range of session border controller offerings.

One of the many great views during the walking tour of Jerusalem

 A highlight of the event was the Wednesday evening walking tour of Old Jerusalem.  For many, this was the first time to the city that the three major religions call home.  From the narrow streets filled with vendors, to the most holy sites, it was an awe inspiring opportunity to see and hear a very special place first hand.

From talking to many of the partners, the feedback was very positive and I'm sure they will join me in returning next year.

Over the Christmas break, my father and I were talking about interesting events in his life when he slipped into his office to retrieve some pictures.  He returned with the below collection of pictures his father took of the Antarctic Snow Cruiser as it came through little Avon, NY in November 1939.  This behemoth of a machine was designed to be a complete mobile living quarters and laboratory that could traverse wide open and frigid Antarctic continent.  It was so big, they had to drive it from the factory where it was built in Gary, Indiana to Boston where it could be loaded onto a ship for transport to Antarctica.  Thus the visit to Avon, NY and the picture taking opportunity by my father and grandfather in 1939.

The Antarctic Snow Cruiser in the Star Diner parking lot in Avon, NY during November 1939.

You may be wondering: "What does this have to do with SIP?"  Once you know the whole story of the Antarctic Snow Cruiser, you'll understand that this monster of a machine is a classic case study in over engineering that never did work.  After all the work that went into the design, construction and transport of the Snow Cruiser to Antarctica, it was a complete failure.  The combination of the immense weight and large tires made the Snow Cruiser virtually useless in Antarctica.  As a matter of fact, it was so incapable of moving in snow, that it got stuck during the process of unloading from the ship!  You can read more about the folly of the Antarctic Snow Cruiser on both Wikipedia and Joel Dirnberger's web site on the topic.

 I worry that we in the Telecommunications space are close to building our own Antarctic Snow Cruiser.  Every time I sit through a session on IMS, I can see the Snow Cruiser spinning it's massive wheels in the snow.   I worry that so much is being invested in building the "unified application platform" that we'll never actually see it in use. 

Every day I work with customers that are developing applications, leveraging SIP to create powerful and useful applications, but without all the baggage that IMS carries.  How do they do it?  KISS  (Keep it Simple Stupid)  They use the SIP architecture to connect basic building blocks like media servers and media gateways together with their application.  This architecture gives the freedom to create applications and simplifies the effort to quickly deploy solutions - generating revenue.

The next time you start working on a new application - just ask yourself "will this just sit and spin it's wheels in the snow?"

For those of you that have been following our series of webinars on SIP-enabled applications, we just posted my most recent whitepaper on conferencing / collaboration applications:

SIP Conferencing/Collaboration
Global organizations utilize conference calls as a very important business tool for collaboration. Multi-branch organizations were the first to recognize the value in voice and video conferencing services to economize on travel costs and to coordinate business activities. Other smaller organizations have also begun to recognize that having access to easy-to-use conferencing resources speed up collaboration efforts with clients and suppliers. Whether using a traditional TDM PBX, an IP-PBX or a hosted service provider, SIP is seen as a key technology going forward to help tie organizations together and dramatically reduce the costs of conferencing.

As voice is virtually ubiquitous in all conferencing applications, this whitepaper will focus on the voice component, whether from PSTN callers or from web-based conference clients. We'll save the other media types for future whitepapers

Click here to download your own copy.  Happy reading!