April 2006 Archives

In this article I interview Robert Sparks on the state of SIMPLE, here is an excerpt from SIP Magazine...

EL: Robert, where are we with SIMPLE today, is it nearing a useful state?

RjS: Definitely. The good news is that SIMPLE is primarily a done deal from a standards perspective. We have long finished the core parts of the protocol. The Working Group still exists and is active. With a couple of exceptions most of our work now is simply taking the last crumbs of the meal. The exceptions are to do with some ongoing work in putting together the last of the framework that’s needed for a user of SIMPLE to be able to tell a service provider what their preferences are on how people can reach them.

EL: What will partial updates for XCAP mean to the users?

RjS: The best way to look at that would be talk about a couple of use cases. We currently have the technology to reproduce a classic Instant Messenger not unlike Yahoo!, MSN, AOL and that has been in place for a while. The work that we are doing right now will allow the user to say additional things apart from the typical status messages like “At lunch” or “On the phone”.

More here: Read the entire article

VoIP and Software in the News again.

Well, FINALLY! As a shareholder of Sonorit I was asked to keep quiet and not blog about the companies (Sonorit and Camino Networks) at all. I kept my word and let the rest of the world find out about it before I blogged it. Yes, there are other shareholders of Sonorit that are industry names you would readily recognize. You may remember a story I posted last summer about a competitor to GIPS.

Andy ponders the reason for the purchase and delivers, as usual, a great summary on the transaction. He speculates that this buy will provide technology that eBay can own as opposed to license.

I would say that is a good bet Andy, considering the current legal proceedings with GIPS, where some of the key people of Sonorit came from. UPDATE Alec chimes in and provides additional perspective on the deal. The story was also covered by: San Jose Business Journal BusinessWeek CIO.com

Shift is doing quite well, I am SO glad I joined when I did SMB VoIP in Canada is on fire! Here is an exerpt from the press release put out today on recent growth numbers...

"We exceeded our subscriber target for the first quarter and booked over one million dollars in contracted revenues in a quarter for the first time. We've also launched Shift in our third major western market, Vancouver, western Canada's largest market. Vancouver just opened in late March and over 10% of our new subscribers signed this quarter are Vancouver clients," comments Trent Johnsen, Shift President and CEO.

Shift Press Release

Analyst Perspective - Session 3 - Optical Stocks (13 mins) Subscribe to the Podcast analyst-perspective-cisco-om-malik.mp3

We are seeing some action on the Optical Stocks and Om Malik's recent post points out some good reasons why. In this podcast we talk about Om's assessment of Cisco's broadband positioning we also talk about ADC Telecom's opportunities which from what I can see may be undervalued today.

Want to see some coverage on a public US stock in the tech space? Send an email to [email protected] or leave a comment.

The PR between BridgePort and Openwave points out the IPR that the two companies have recently collaborated on. It looks to me like Openwave is looking to leverage BridgePort's mobile technology as a piece of their IMS offering and roaming.


PR is listed below...

A little birdy has told me that Bridgeport Networks is creating quite the stir at CTIA this year with a few big announcements coming down the pipe tomorrow morning. Stay tuned for that news early tomorrow.

VON Canada - I've been to the edge...

I went from the plane directly to the hotel. Checked in and dropped my bags behind the counter. Trent was waiting, we had a serious mission that needed our attention immediately upon my arrival in Toronto.

We had two tickets to see the Jays and Twins in the season opener at Rogers Centre, yes we have our priorities straight, dead on. There we met with our partners from Natural Convergence, who says you can't mix business with pleasure.

The next morning started early, breakfast at 6:30am, 3:30am Vancouver time.. needless to say I was a little slow to get started. Our 7:30 meeting was downtown, just a few blocks from the hotel, with a certain financial group which went off well I thought.

From there I went to my VON presentation: SMB IP Market Opportunity which seemed to be well received, Jon Arnold did a great job moderating. Joining me on the panel were David Madelstam - Sangoma, Mahshad Koohgoli - Avaya P2P and Paul H. from Cisco. The pitch was pretty much the same across the board; cost, reliability, features, and simplicity. In my presentation, I coined this paradigm shift in the SMB space as SMB 2.0, I just couldn’t resist.

It certainly was a smaller show than San Jose but it was large compared to the VON Canada 2 years ago when Trent and I met up for that first ball game. On a sidebar, somebody said that they heard that Pulver and I do not get along. Maybe someone knows something I do not but from where I am sitting Jeff and I get along just fine, such a weird comment.

Trent and I grabbed a quick lunch with our bankers and then onward to the airport for a quick trip to Ottawa. I was supposed to be in a dinner meeting this eve (as I write this) but I opted out as I needed to spend some quality time with my wife, if only by phone. Lisa has been waiting patiently in the shadows as I jet set around the continent tending to Shift business.

My wife deserves better. Don't get me wrong, I love my job but I love my wife and son more. Tomorrow we are in meetings all day here and then back on a plane to Vancouver to deal with some business and record the Analyst Perspective podcast there before the weekend sets in.

Thanks to everyone who made it out to VON Canada, it was great to see that showing of support for IP Communications in Canada.

Fellow blogger Om does a good job of summarizing yesterday's Lucent Alcatel announcement. Our analyst Angelo and I have been speculating what this will do to the market, check out the podcast for some Wall Street perspective.

Looks like Alec is at it again, braking all the laws of physics going against mother nature and generally just messing with people's heads. Just kidding. But he is doing some cool stuff with IAX.

For the more than 250,000 Asterisk IP-PBX installations around-the-world, getting the right phone call, at the right time, and on the right device just got easier thanks to iotum. Today, at VON Canada in Toronto, iotum announced the beta availability of the iotum Asterisk integration module; two relevance-enabled call management applications for Asterisk and a rich new set of developer API’s.